PCI IDE Cards

gobigred,

Grant recommended a card that was on clearance at Christmas time. We put one into a B&W and it was plug and play. For full features, you will want to download driver software. Go back to the link you listed. They offer some driver tools worth considering.

Ji˜m

The 128 GB limitation applies to the onboard IDE controller, and not to an ATA-133 controller card that supports 48-bit logical block addressing, which enables recognition of large drives. If connected to an ATA-133 controller card, partitioning the 320 GB drive is your choice, although I prefer to partition larger drives for the ease/speed of routine disk maintenance. The Acard AEC-6280M ATA-133 controller card for Macs is consistently priced lowest here.

Sonnet and SIIG also market Mac controller cards, but whichever brand that you choose to purchase, it must be the Mac version, because the PC versions of these cards aren't compatible. Bootable controller cards must be firmware-based and not driver-based. The card's ROM is read at boot, so that connected drive(s) are functional. If the controller card required a driver to be read from the hard drive, the sequence for doing so couldn't occur, because the hard drive isn't recognized until the controller card (to which it's connected) is recognized.

OS 9 has a limitation on the size of a bootable partition, I think it's around 200GB, regardless of the controller.

I think this is the article you are referring to:

86178- Macintosh: Using 128 GB or Larger ATA Hard Drives

Because the current ATA-133 cards (such as the ACARD 6280M and later) provide a simulated SCSI controller, most of the restrictions mentioned do not apply. [Some would apply to the older, now discontinued 6260M.]

But the discussion does mention that to be recognizable under 9.2.2, the maximum partition size is 200 GB.