Don't these cards work in G5s too? At least as "Unknown AHCI Standard Controller", not bootable?
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OWC Accelsior S
- Thread starter flyproductions
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i had one in my old mac pro, i think they require snow leopard. i would kernel panic in tiger if it was installed
So what about Leo? It was the first OS to have somehow "generic" support for AHCI-controllers. I have some Marvell SATA III card in the Quad, which is also officialy not Mac, but works fine. Not bootable, of course.
im not sure about leopard, never tried it on the mac pro (i no longer own that mac pro, traded to a friend)
but owc's official statement is that it requires at least snow leopard (and i do know it works in snow leopard from my testing)
It's a G5, i asked for. For Mac Pro from 1,1 up this card is certified by OWC.
The SATA 3 controller, i use in the Quad is this one:
Works fine with Leopard. But sadly it's only one lane. So in the G5's first gen PCIe itis limited to around 200 MB/s. You get the exact same speed for a single SSD as for a Raid 0 of two. Also tested Tiger again. Nothing crashed or paniced. The card and all that is attached to it are just ignored.
So an hour ago i ordered the Accelsior. If it doesn't work in the G5, i can still use it in one of my Pros, where it should at least be faster than the tray-loads. And if it works (which i tend to thin), even if only recognized as "generic AHCI" with one lane, it should at least also deliver +/- 200MB. So two of them in Raid 0 should be a nice speedbump for an old G5.
I apologise if I sound like a broken record, but for a Mac Pro, you might as well use a native PCIe AHCI SSD for maximum speed and bootability.
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This one is for the G5 Quad (which i hope it works in). Might end up in the spare-pro, if it doesn't.
For my daily driver i prefer this...
...which comes up with this...
😝
It’s a shame that wouldn’t work on a Mac Pro running anything lower than High Sierra. I’d love to see the way NVMe support on something as “lowly” as Snow Leopard would make SL scream even faster than it already does — to say nothing of tinkering with SL-PPC on, say, a DC 2.3 or QC 2.5 G5 running SL-PPC.
[Oh no. I just gave myself a bad idea about something adjacent to that last sentence — bad, as in, a “need” for more hardware in my life.]
If you use AHCI SSDs rather than NVMe ones, you can boot [Snow] Leopard off them. Like the Samsung XP941 or SM951 (careful: there’s both AHCI and NVMe versions of the SM951) or Apple's SSUAX or SSUBX. They're older and not as fast as the latest NVMe drives, but still significantly faster than any SATA SSD.
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This thing is from Aliexpress. It is some kind of clone of the 500 € HighPoint-card. For a very short time they have been sub 200 €. So i just couldn't resist.
Hmm, i tested the unreleased Beta, but was in no way convinced. To many things not working properly or not at all. I'm now on Sorbet-Leo on most of my PPC-machines (including the Quad). Can't see. murch improvement in performance. But at least it has much mor recent security certificates. So webbrowsing is possible again.
Oh yes! I am still very happy with the Pro 5,1. Power consumption aside, i can not imagine needing anything faster ever again. And along with that, it is barely audible.
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The unreleased SL-PPC betas, out-of-box with none of the fixes segued in, isn’t going to be impressive to the everyday PPC user.
With the community’s considerable work on those SL-PPC fixes and other refinements, the SL-PPC builds can be a lot of fun to work with, and they offer a glimpse of the direction Apple was going with late PPC models (before Jobs ordered the nixing of the dual-architecture plan for Snow Leopard or tentative plans for it to follow in Leopard’s steps).
A few folks on here have devoted their testing work on getting Build 10A190 to run smoothly across multiple G5 and late G4 Macs; I’ve been in the minority as I’ve preoccupied myself with making Build 10A96 run well (and only, for now, on one specific Mac).
“Sorbet Leopard” is, by and large, a repackaging of many PowerPC Macs forum community tweaks and optimizations over the many years prior to z970’s appearance, which he then rolled into one pre-installed image (and why one can’t actually “install” it) and branded it as his own. Which is to say, several of the MR PPC forum members were having 10.5.8 run as optimally and quickly as “Sorbet Leopard” long before it became a thing.
For those who want a tweaked version of 10.5.8 (which is, literally, what it is, running on the 10.5.8 kernel, or Darwin 9.8.0) but don’t want to do the several community tweaks themselves, then it’s perfect for that purpose.
Indeed! The MacPro5,1 is wonderful for its native ability to run Snow Leopard (screamingly fast), on up to the currently supported macOS builds (with help from OCLP and a Metal-compliant GPU card). If I could find one locally for a reasonable price, I’d buy it in a hurry.
I think, this one was exactly what i tested. Not installing, but cloning the mounted image to a disk via CCC. I don't even really remember, what it was. But i remember there beeing one particular thing, beside a few other smaller ones, which made it a complete no-go as an everyday-system for me.
Sorry for crediting the wrong people, if i did, and for taking the easy way. But i was looking for the best daily usable OS for some Powermacs in my collection. Not so much for something to play around and experiment with. And in this aspect Sorbet appeared just like Leo with some small improvements to me. Stable running and reliable.
I do not run LeopardRebirth because
a) IMHO Leopard might well look like Leopard. If i like to have the look of HS around, i fire up the Pro
b) and much more important, i don't like things to dig deep into guts of the system for nothing but cosmetic reasons
Well i have even two of them! A Dual, which is my daily driver, almost maxed out, running High Sierra. Still using some 32bit stuff and a GTX 1080 made HS the best choice.
And a Single, which i got for cheap, to test the new stuff. I was surprised how unexpectetly stable and daily usable even Monterey runs on a machine from over a decade ago with OCLP. But Ventura is definately over the top! If half of the old kexts have to be patched in to get it running with very basic and important things like Bluetooth support still missing, it just doesn't fit anymore. And i also don't like the look. Looks more like a mobile OS, matching some portrait-oriented viewport to me.
Well that's for the Pro! And they have far better (and in some cases even cheaper!) options today.
Leo on a PPC only offers some very basic AHCI-support. A few chipsets like JMicron or Marvell work nicely for storage. With the limitations that one lane cards in first Gen PCIe face: read/write-speeds of less than 200 MB/s per slot. But to boot a PPC, they need some fCode firmware (which only some Seritek/Firmtek or Sonnet cards have).
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Get Sonnet Tempo SSD, if you do not use 10.6 PPC: https://www.amazon.com/Sonnet-Technologies-Tempo-Drives-TSATA6-SSD-E2/dp/B0096P62G6
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As far as I’m aware, as a by-product of doing a lot of kext testing on the SL-PPC/Clouded Leopard project (see Table 4), the IOAppleAHCIFamily.kext in 10.5.8 and early 10.6 developer builds features Intel-only binaries.
In addition to Sonnet, have a look at FirmTek’s SeriTek PCIe cards. They’ve made several PCIe products — some of which will run natively on PCIe G5s (in addition to Mac Pros), while others are for 10.6.x and up on Mac Pros (likely due to later PCIe revision requirements, such as 2.0).
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I’ve just checked 10.5.8’s
IOAHCIFamily.kext and it’s universal. I’ve not checked AppleAHCIPort.kext.
Quite easy: It's native NVMe support, beeing available up from HS with bootrom >140.xxx. Any blade works fully bootable with w/r-speeds of about 1.500MB/s with 10$/€ adaptors. This is for the 4,1/5,1.Can you elaborate on these?
And for the earlier Pros IMHO the best "upgrade" today might be to just get a 4,1/5,1. At least in my opinion they do not have the collectors value, the Powermacs like the G5 Quad have. And the later Mac Pros, single processor models in the first place, are available at price points today, that make tinkering around with the 1,1 to 3,1 just not worth the hussle.
Well… heck:
Code:
sh-4.3# uname -a
Darwin glaciologia.private 10.0.0d1 Darwin Kernel Version 10.0.0d1: Tue Jun 3 23:38:02 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1292.3~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh
sh-4.3# pwd
/System/Library/Extensions/IOAHCIFamily.kext
sh-4.3# find . -exec file {} \; | grep "Mach-O universal binary with"
./Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIFamily: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
./Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCIBlockStorage.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCIBlockStorage: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architectures
./Contents/PlugIns/IOAHCISerialATAPI.kext/Contents/MacOS/IOAHCISerialATAPI: Mach-O universal binary with 3 architecturesWhen I ran the testing on the kext — and cross-referenced them with resources (such as on osx86.tistory.com) — IOAHCIFamily.text came up as Intel-only:
I’m gonna need to revisit this in earnest. Frankly, I think I’m gonna need to find a DC 2.3 locally to take up more testing on that system and to cross-check which kexts and frameworks load on that hardware, against what loads on a PowerBook G4 (or, for that matter, a Mac mini G4). There may be a handful of other components which might need updating in the Clouded Leopard wikipost.
Well, this is how these AHCI-SATA cards appear in Leo PPC:
The difference between the Marvell and the one showing up as "unknown" is, that for the Marvell i added the relevant data like vendor, device etc. to the AHCI kext's info.plist while the other is a Digitus with JMicron chip, which i just plugged in. The difference is just cosmetic, as they just work the same: read and write as one wold expect from a single lane card on a PCIe 1.0.: Read little more than 200, write about 170. But not bootable.
Yes, i know about these cards. The main disadvantage vs. the Accelsior is (if one finds a source at all) their still at least three times higher price point.
Also i played around with some Delock card which had a SIL 3132 on it. I even soldered a bigger EEPROM to it to get it flashed with the Seritek 2SE2's ROM. In the end i got it to boot. But, even beeing SATA 2, speeds have been barely 20MB/s faster than the Quad's onboard SATA 1. So remarkably slower than the generic AHCI-cards.
Edit: The Marvell card is even SATA 3. But it doesn't make any difference as the G5's PCIe just can not deliver. One can even plug both of the SSDs to it and configure them to run in RAID 0 without the speeds increasing just one single MB/s.
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Absolutely. But my point was that if you’re "stuck" with an earlier version than High Sierra — for some reason or another — NVMe SSDs are out. So, the few AHCI blades out there are the fastest option then, even though they come at a premium.
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If you don’t mind posting, could you click on the Software > Extensions tab in ASP and scroll to the portion of the list starting with “IO…” and also the portion of the list starting with “AppleA…” and post those screen caps?
Cheers!
My pleasure...if it helps to get a fully working Snow Leo for PPC one day. 😁Thank you! This is really helpful.