Starmax 3000 and Marvell-88SA8052 - bypass GB limits + other questions

[InuNacho]

Years ago I picked up StarMax 3000 with a G3 upgrade card installed in it from a local community ewaste pickup drive.
Btw these things are great for hobbyists if you just ask if you can take stuff without drives.

Anyways I know these older machines have a hard drive capacity limit. What is the limit on this model, does the G3 card and potentially installing a later version of 9 fix this?

Will the spare Marvell-88SA8052 IDE-SATA I have solve this? I found this adapter cheapy online and it works flawlessly in 933MHz Quicksilver for 9 and X but this model doesn't have a HDD capacity limit.

I have yet to work on this computer minus adding a new clock battery to it.
Any quirks or other oddities I should know about? I downloaded the install image from Macintosh Garden and will install it soon.

 

[eyoungren]

Absolutely no idea regarding your questions. But I would guess the limit is 128GB and that your PCI card would allow you to work around that.

I'm mainly replying to make you aware of the ATA Hi-Cap Driver which you can install to get around and hard drive limits.

 

[ww2_1943]

I have a StarMax 4000/200. It is actually a pre-production model but from what I can tell it uses all production components.

I had a hard time getting a SSD to work. I used two different brands of IDE-SATA adapter.

Your partitions have to be 128GB or less.

To make a long story short, the only way I was able to install a bootable Mac OS was by using a Mac OS 8 disk tools floppy. That was the only thing the computer would actually boot to. I couldn't boot from CD including a copy of the StarMax recovery CD. Once the computer was booted to the OS 8 floppy, I was able to run a CD-Rom and install Mac OS 9. I ended up making several partitions and installed 7.6, 8.5, and 9.2.

I never figured out how to make the CD-ROM recognizable while the computer was booted from the SSD. The drive received power and you could hear it spin. I tried FWB CD-ROM Toolkit and multiple extensions, including ones that are universal and designed for non-Apple branded CD-ROM drives. Nothing worked.

 

[domii]

I have made partitions larger than 128gb using my SATA PCI cards, I think the 128GB was just from the ATA/66 bus - its limit is 128GB drive size. I had a Starmax 3000 before also.

But being an oldworld mac, there is some kind of 8gb partition limit (on the first partition - all partitions after the first don't have that limit). I know I can make partitions of any size, and I had tried a larger partition before, but I did had strange behaviours and lockups once I exceeded 8gb used space on that volume.

 

[InuNacho]

I have made partitions larger than 128gb using my SATA PCI cards, I think the 128GB was just from the ATA/66 bus - its limit is 128GB drive size. I had a Starmax 3000 before also.

But being an oldworld mac, there is some kind of 8gb partition limit (on the first partition - all partitions after the first don't have that limit). I know I can make partitions of any size, and I had tried a larger partition before, but I did had strange behaviours and lockups once I exceeded 8gb used space on that volume.

Interesting and thank you for that advice. I might go the CF card route on this computer instead of IDE-SATA like my Quicksilver.