SATA PCI Card - OS independant?

[dpaanlka]

Installing a SATA PCI card into a PCI Mac, such as Sonnet's Tempo Serial ATA card, will work with Mac OS 8.0 and up, according to Sonnet. But, praytell, what does the OS actually have to do with the card? Especially since this Sonnet card does not even have drivers to go with it. Mac OS 8.0 is the minimum "supported" is what I'm reading. And we all know Mac OS 8.0 came out way way before SATA appeared on the scene.

So, with that stated, what is everone's opinions of this working with Mac OS 7.6.1?

Don't ask why. You should all be used to these kinds of questions from me by now...​

 

[janey]

well iirc the SATA protocol has a particular section in which it lays out a backwards-compatible parallel ATA emulation scheme thing. So I guess it'll work with older OSs with no native SATA support, but please don't take my word for it.

Then again, that defeats the purpose of SATA, almost.

 

[StealthRider]

It doesn't "work with no drivers". It simply has the drivers built-in to the OS, or, as janey said, will emulate PATA in older machines.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Some ATA cards emulate SCSI cards to operate in older Macs - IDK about this particular one.

 

[dpaanlka]

Some ATA cards emulate SCSI cards to operate in older Macs - IDK about this particular one.

Which SATA cards might those be?

 

[CanadaRAM]

Which SATA cards might those be?

IDK in particular about the SATA cards, but the Sonnet IDE (ATA 66) cards emulated a SCSI interface to OS8 and 9 which is how they were abe to run without drivers in machines that didn't know from IDE.

 

[dpaanlka]

Hmm well maybe I'll get lucky and this will work the same with with the SATA card.