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good sata pci card for pm g4

K

Keebler

macrumors 68030
Original poster
hi there,

i'm looking for suggestions on buying a sata pci card for my g4 dually 1.25.

4 internals would be great, but if it had some externals, it might be worth it.

links appreciated of course 🙂

i'm in canada if that helps with any online stores.

cheers,
keebler
 
I couldn't find a SATA PCI card (not even the sonnet card either) which could support more than 2 drives? HMMM>...
 
Angrist said:
SIIG makes one.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/SIIG/SCSA4M12/

I can't attest to the performance, but it IS on my list of toys to buy.
Click to expand...

I've had that exact same card in my QS for almost a year now, notta problemo with 4 drives connected to it 🙂

Go4it !

ps: Firmtek also makes this type of card too.......I had a 2-port one prior to getting the SIIG (I needed 2 more connections & didn't wanna use up another pci slot for a second card)
 
princealfie said:
but is the SIIG card reliable? I'm worried about it if it's not Sonnet branded.
Click to expand...


well, as I said before: "I've had that exact same card in my QS for almost a year now, notta problemo with 4 drives connected to it"

the card has a Lifetime warranty, so they seem confident about the reliability/quality of their products.

So whazzzupp with your fixation on Sonnet's stuff ? I've used their products too notta problemo, but that doesn't mean other mfgr's stuff is any more or any less reliable 😕
 
4 channels - would regular PCI offer enough bandwidth for 4 7200rpm sata drives?

If not, where's the limit? If I got my calculations right 2 could already saturate it.

If not, maybe I should get one of those, too. 😎
 
localghost said:
4 channels - would regular PCI offer enough bandwidth for 4 7200rpm sata drives?

If not, where's the limit? If I got my calculations right 2 could already saturate it.
Click to expand...

Unless you're pegging all four drives at once I wouldn't worry about it.
 
Firmtek makes PCI-X/PCI (backwards compatible) in 4 x internal, and 2 x in/2x external formats.

Its not a question of whether PCI can support the theoretical maximum *bandwidth* of 4 at once, since the CPU can only issue requests serially anyway; its the *latency* of the drives that is the limiting factor.

If you have 4 successive requests to one drive, each request has to wait for the head to seek the correct track, wait for the platter to rotate to the correct sector, then read.write, then seek again for the next request.

If you have 4 requests going sequentially to 4 drives, the requests can go out at top speed without waiting for the first request to be complete. Ideally, by the time Drive 1 has completed its request, request #5 is ready to issue.

Fortunately, dividing the Scratch, Data, System and Application functions across 4 drives makes fairly good use of this type of interleaving, and can really speed up Photoshop and Final Cut.

Thanks
Trevor
CanadaRAM.com
 
I had the SIIG card in my B&W since sometime in late 2004 and it worked perfectly since the day i bought it.
 
i had the sonnet 2 channel card in my quicksilver, had absolutely no problems with it.

If possible, you could just run 2 cards.
 
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