do they make a pci (33mhz) SATA II card?

Hi

I'm not aware of a PCI SATA II card.

With 33MHz PCI you're mainly limited by the speed of the cards. For example, a 32-bit card has a theoretical maximum throughput of 132MB/sec, a 64-bit card 264MB/sec.

You're also limited by the speed of the PCI bus itself. In practice the earlier G4s have a maximum throughput of less than 220MB/sec. That's for the entire PCI bus and all the cards connected to it. With the Sawtooth, I'm also fairly certain the FireWire and USB ports etc also connect to the memory controller via the PCI bus, so the 220MB/sec has to be shared between a number of devices.

The Mac Pro uses PCI Express slots. Most of the G5s use PCI or PCI-X slots (except for the last dual core models which use PCI Express). You could buy a card that would work in your G4 and a G5, but not your G4 and a Mac Pro.

I think $50 is the cheapest I've seen, perhaps $65 is more realistic for a decent card. The FirmTek SeriTek 1S2 is a popular 32-bit 2 port card that works well. Sonnet also sell a rebadged version called the Sonnet Tempo.

i know this came up in my last topic you helped me
w/, but given my throughput limitations, is there any
realistic advantage to a 10k SATA drive?

The main performance limitation is the drive itself. Even the fastest 10K WD Raptors achieve less than 100MB/sec sustained throughput. In that sense, a 10K SATA drive is an advantage, as you're still getting the full benefit. The throughput limitations of the 33MHz PCI bus only come into play if you're using two or more drives in a RAID configuration.

I'm basically down to deciding between either a
500GB WD SE16 (or RE2)
or a
150GB WD 10k Raptor X

I guess it comes down to whether capacity or performance is more important. I think the performance gap between the 10K Raptor and some higher capacity 7.2K drives has actually closed over the last year or so. It may be worth checking out BareFeats to find a fast high capacity drive, e.g.

http://www.barefeats.com/boot02.html

If you need capacity and performance, perhaps a couple of 250GB drives in a RAID 0 would be a better choice. They'd be much faster than a single 10K drive and still provide the capacity you need. A 32-bit card may become the limiting factor depending on how fast the drives themselves are, but ultimately it would still be faster than using a single 10K drive.

I don't think RAID 0 improves boot times much, but it should help in other respects.

bmcmahan and Rodney,
There is indeed a PCI SATA II controller. It is made by Hi-Point and is called the RocketRAID 1740. However, consider that a 33Mhz PCI slot is only capable of 264 MB/sec (8 bytes times 33 Mhz). As such, even if said controller/HD combo could reach the maximum transfer rate the band width of the slot would still limit you to less than the max rate of a SATA II hard drive. As a last note, according to Sonnet, their SATA card connected to (4) SATA hard drives in RAID 0 maxed out at 202 MB/sec which ain't too shabby. Hope all this useless trivia helps.

Cheers,
Chris

1.4 GHz "digital audio",1.5 GB RAM, 500 GB SATA HD, Firmtek Seritek 1V4 Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-111D, BFG 6800 GT oc, 30GB 5.5G video, 4GB 1G nano

Hi

According to the BareFeats link posted above, RAID 0 has little affect on boot or application launch times. I believe it does help though when you're working with large files, perhaps audio or video.

The following link contains some useful info on using the SeriTek 1S2 in a Sawtooth:

http://www.macgurus.com/faq/sata_faq.php

It's slighty dated but contains the following:

A Sawtooth upgraded with even a single 800 MHz processor and this card is a fine machine. SeriTek/1S2 will outperform any ATA card in that machine by a good margin. Remark: for best performance please use only ONE card in Sawtooth. It was optimized to do so. What do I mean by that? To expand and provide some background: Regarding the multiple card set-up on G4 machines with AGP video and 3 PCI slots ("Mystic" and "Sawtooth" models), the background: some beta testers did try to speed up their system by using two SeriTek/1S2 cards and "spanning" a RAID-0 across these cards on the affected machines. The result was, instead of an expected speed-up, some speed degradation. On the other hand, if the user creates a "stripe" on a single card, the benefit of using SeriTek/1S2 is, as we did see, substantial, even compared with Acard "hardware" RAID. That is why I say that the card was optimized for a single-card setup on these machines. However, if the user wanted a second SeriTek/1S2 card in these machines and does not "span" a RAID across multiple cards, there is no sign of any slowdown. Nor is there a slowdown if another ATA or SCSI card is present in any other slot. The performance issues will only appear if the RAID is made "across" multiple HBA-s on the PCI bus of the affected machines.

The following link also contains more info re RAID 0 versus a single drive in a G4:

http://www.barefeats.com/hard30.html