Stock ATA vs PCI ATA in G4 Sawtooth

[mectojic]

Possibly a noob question, so bear with me.

On a Sawtooth G4, would an SSD with PATA-SATA adapter run faster on the inbuilt ATA bus, or through a PCI ATA-133 card? And is there any advantage to using the inbuilt bus vs PCI?

Feel like someone on this forum mentioned that its better not to overcrowd the PCI lanes, but maybe I was mistaken.

 

[wnlewis]

It will run decidedly faster with SSD drives going through a SATA card in the PCI bus. What you want is the Firmtek/SeriTek 1V4 card. That is especially true if you run OS 9. The interesting thing about it is that it sees the drives as SCSI drives which means that you can put a 1 Tb drive in your G4 Sawtooth and use all of the space on it, even if you didn't partition it. You are going to want the EVO 840 series of drives for that work. The newer drives won't work. You can put the 840 EVO into a more modern Mac, even a Mac Pro 1,X to 5,1 and run Samsung Drive Magician under Windows and it will tell you the health of the 840. Plus, your Mac will boot off the 840 on the PCI side and the SSD's take decidedly less power.

 

[Project Alice]

Possibly a noob question, so bear with me.

On a Sawtooth G4, would an SSD with PATA-SATA adapter run faster on the inbuilt ATA bus, or through a PCI ATA-133 card? And is there any advantage to using the inbuilt bus vs PCI?

Feel like someone on this forum mentioned that its better not to overcrowd the PCI lanes, but maybe I was mistaken.

I run SATA HDDs off a PCI SATA card in my Mystic, and in my sawtooth prior to getting the mystic.

I mainly have it just to use SATA drives as they’re easier to find, and to get around the 128GB limit. Don’t even have an SSD in it. I can’t really tell if it’s faster. I think I ran xbench at one point and saw a difference in the numbers; but in actual usage I can’t really tell.
I do have an ATA-133 card in a B&W “G4” kinda the same story.

If you’re using a SATA SSD though just get a SATA card it’ll be slightly less bottlenecked. And you won’t need an adapter.

 

[mectojic]

I get, obviously, that a PCI Sata card is easier and probably faster, but I simply don't have one. I also don't possess what is needed to flash one.

All I have is an Ata-133 pci card, and am curious if it speeds up anything. From limited testing, it seems that it takes longer to boot, simply because it has to search for the pci card... but not much else seemed to change.

 

[Amethyst1]

All I have is an Ata-133 pci card, and am curious if it speeds up anything. […]

If you have a drive capable of saturating the internal ATA-66 bus, the card will enable faster transfer rates. Whether you’re going to notice that is a different matter.

 

[wnlewis]

I get, obviously, that a PCI Sata card is easier and probably faster, but I simply don't have one. I also don't possess what is needed to flash one.

All I have is an Ata-133 pci card, and am curious if it speeds up anything. From limited testing, it seems that it takes longer to boot, simply because it has to search for the pci card... but not much else seemed to change.

The Firmtek/Seritek 1V4 card is purpose designed for the G4/G5 Mac's. My experience with the card is that the boot time is remarkably quicker. Firmtek/Seritek's equipment is not inexpensive and they do not answer phones or Email very well. It can take up to two or three weeks for turnaround since the cards are made to order and they ship from China. But if you are willing to do those things, I think you will like the results.

 

[Project Alice]

I get, obviously, that a PCI Sata card is easier and probably faster, but I simply don't have one. I also don't possess what is needed to flash one.

All I have is an Ata-133 pci card, and am curious if it speeds up anything. From limited testing, it seems that it takes longer to boot, simply because it has to search for the pci card... but not much else seemed to change.

This is the one I have. (Not my auction)
This one might be OS X only for booting, I can’t remember.

 

[mectojic]

This is the one I have. (Not my auction)
This one might be OS X only for booting, I can’t remember.

I saw this one, which claims to work with OS 9.

2 Port SATA PCI Controller Card Apple Macintosh PowerMac G3/G4/G5 *OSX *OS 9 SSD | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 2 Port SATA PCI Controller Card Apple Macintosh PowerMac G3/G4/G5 *OSX *OS 9 SSD at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

But can these actually Boot OS 9? Or just be detected within OS 9? Does yours boot OS X?

 

[ervus]

faster on the inbuilt ATA bus, or through a PCI ATA-133 card?

These will be about the same. There is a SSD benchmark thread here with results of some different setups. Even a 32-bit PCI SATA card won't be much different from what I've seen posted. Theoretically, a 64-bit PCI SATA card would be significantly faster, but I've only seen results posted from a RAID card (more than 200MB/s on a G4).

There's an Action Retro video about this too:

yt.512mb.org/watch?v=R19QIX2jG78

 

[Project Alice]

I saw this one, which claims to work with OS 9.

2 Port SATA PCI Controller Card Apple Macintosh PowerMac G3/G4/G5 *OSX *OS 9 SSD | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 2 Port SATA PCI Controller Card Apple Macintosh PowerMac G3/G4/G5 *OSX *OS 9 SSD at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

But can these actually Boot OS 9? Or just be detected within OS 9? Does yours boot OS X?

Mine boots OS X. I don’t think mine boots OS 9. It’s an SIL3114 I think, the 3112 is what can boot OS 9.
The Mac it’s in has a Geforce 6200, and is never used for OS 9 so I might not have even tried though.
I’m not sure I even have it installed tbh.

 

[mectojic]

Mine boots OS X. I don’t think mine boots OS 9. It’s an SIL3114 I think, the 3112 is what can boot OS 9.
The Mac it’s in has a Geforce 6200, and is never used for OS 9 so I might not have even tried though.
I’m not sure I even have it installed tbh.

Do you think any SIL3112 could boot OS 9, or do certain vendors not work?

 

[Project Alice]

Do you think any SIL3112 could boot OS 9, or do certain vendors not work?

Depends on the firmware that’s on it.
The firmware that’s on the SATA card thread here is the correct firmware.

 

[DearthnVader]

I saw this one, which claims to work with OS 9.

2 Port SATA PCI Controller Card Apple Macintosh PowerMac G3/G4/G5 *OSX *OS 9 SSD | eBay

Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for 2 Port SATA PCI Controller Card Apple Macintosh PowerMac G3/G4/G5 *OSX *OS 9 SSD at the best online prices at eBay! Free shipping for many products!

www.ebay.com

But can these actually Boot OS 9? Or just be detected within OS 9? Does yours boot OS X?

I ordered one of these sometime back from that seller. The good thing is it had the entire FirmTek firmware so it can boot OS 9 from connected drives, the bad news is they modified the voltage IC in an attempt to make it compatible with the G4 QuickSilver. This made the card not function properly in any Mac, I had to replace the IC from a stock PC Card in order to get it to function properly in my PM9600/PMG3 Beige/PMG5, but this means it would not work at all in any of my QS's.

 

[weckart]

I ordered one of these sometime back from that seller. The good thing is it had the entire FirmTek firmware so it can boot OS 9 from connected drives, the bad news is they modified the voltage IC in an attempt to make it compatible with the G4 QuickSilver. This made the card not function properly in any Mac, I had to replace the IC from a stock PC Card in order to get it to function properly in my PM9600/PMG3 Beige/PMG5, but this means it would not work at all in any of my QS's.

That's very odd. I changed the 3.3v regulator IC in a couple of my cards to make them QS compatible but that didn't hinder their working in my other Macs. The IC change was to make them similar to the Sonnet Tempo SATA cards, which work across the board. I can only suppose the seller didn't use the correct IC.

 

[mectojic]

This is the one I have. (Not my auction)
This one might be OS X only for booting, I can’t remember.

Using that one, is the boot time decent? I'm booting Macs up a lot, so it is an issue for me.

 

[Project Alice]

Using that one, is the boot time decent? I'm booting Macs up a lot, so it is an issue for me.

On my sawtooth and Mystic it does take a few extra seconds but it never felt like a long time

 

[for this]

Using that one, is the boot time decent? I'm booting Macs up a lot, so it is an issue for me.

Boot time can be interfered by things. Be prepared when using an old computer with add-ons that were not presented when it was still new and supported.

For me, booting from a 2TB Seagate with an ATA/SATA adapter takes quite longer when there is another HDD connected to a cloned Firmtek PCI SATA card with firmware 5.1.3.

The boot time will be back to normal if I replace the 2TB HDD with another drive or update the SATA card's firmware to 5.3.1. But there is a problem with that firmware so I stick to 5.1.3 and live with it.