The Sonnet Tempo SATA

[amishallin]

I recently managed to get 2 of these cards but have mixed results. 1 of the cards (with firmware 5.1.2) works without any issues in my B/W G3 but NOT in Quicksilver G4. The 2nd card (firmware 5.3.1) gives a forbidden symbol when booting the G4 into 10.4/10.5 BUT boots the G3 into 10.4. The 2nd card doesn't boot 9 on either. The 2nd card can bee seen on the G3 when booted into 9/10.4 on the 1st card. I did some poking around and found that Sonnet recommends G4 users downgrade to firmware 5.1.3. Also found Firmtek card driver disks on macintoshgarden.org. Could I just keep flashing different firmware revisions until 1 works? Could this harm the 2nd card if done too many times?

The G4 does see both cards when booted via sata/ata adapter.

Here are both cards as seen on the G3 booted from card 1:

 

[DearthnVader]

The Quicksilver and Digital Auto G4's have issues with the voltage controllers used on these cards, using them can be an iffy proposition.

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,5279.0.html

 

[for this]

Your problem may not be about the card alone.

This card and its firmware are of nearly 20 years old design. It can have weird problems with today's drives.

I see Seagate ST2000DM008-2FR1 in your pic. In case you used it to test your cards, this drive can't be used to boot OS 9, neither when connected to a cloned Firmtek 1s2 card nor SATA-ATA adapter with Jmicron chip, IME.

 

[amishallin]

There have been some positive developments. First of all that Seagate drive was just used as a test dummy to copy files (no booting) to/from and has since been removed from the machine. Both the G3 and G4 have their own ssd. The G3 has an OWC variant and the G4 has a Gigabyte variant which won't be used to boot 9.

After reading the thread from macos9lives above I panicked a little since my soldering skills aren't the best. After closer inspection of the card it does have the MIC29150 regulator. I then followed the instructions for the 5.3.1 firmware and ran the "installPPC.app" first. After rebooting (still via sata/ata adapter) the card is now shown in system profiler as having drivers installed in Leopard (before it apparently didn't). Instead of flashing with the 5.3.1 firmware I flashed it with the 5.1.3 firmware then ran the "FSCAPP_Tiger.app" which appears to run a script. After connecting my SSD to the card it worked! Just to make sure I did 20 full power off/ons to make sure. Since 5.1.3 firmware works I see no reason to try 5.3.1. The other card in the G3 has the same MIC29150 regulator and works flawlessly with Tiger and 9.22.

I checked a "100% compatible" Chinese special I got for super cheap on ebay a while ago and it has a sloppy hack-job MIC29150 hot glued to the back and connected via wires. Don't know why I kept it since it never worked. Guess I have a spare regulator.

I'm quite impressed with the card. It can copy 4GB of data in a little under a minute.