Tempo Ultra ATA66

[Protools5LEGuy]

this sonnet tempo 66 is based on the acard 6280m (or is more similar to)

I have been using 2 cards from Sonnet called ATA 66. They both are ACARD build, one older that came with my G3 was a PCI ULTRA ATA66,  AEC-6260M rev 1.3 worked ok as SCSI on OS9, but is now dead.

I have been testing this week another Tempo Ultra ATA66. That Card is ACARD build too. But it drops the M at the end, normally used to point at Mac compatible models. Just AEC-6260.

That card is seen under OS9, Panther and Leopard as SCSI. But only mounts volumes on OS9 and Panther. It also limits the drives to 120 or 128 Gigs.

So, this card do not allow hardware RAID AFAIK. But it could use software RAID. IIO told me once SCSI were an advantage vs onboard ATA because you could monitor disk transfers.

Also the Mac OS9 software RAID seems to demand SCSI...

[Protools5LEGuy]

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1256255?start=0&tstart=0

Acard 6260m or 6260 not working in 10.5.x

Opps yes ACard replied

Dear Sir,

You might need newer IDE host controller such as our AEC6280M and AEC6880M which support not only the Mac OS X 10.5 but also big drive technology(128G and above).


Thanks for writing!
Your comments make our service improved.

ACARD Technical Support Dept.

This card is meant for OS7-10.3/4

[supernova777]

http://www.acard.com/english/fc0101.jsp

on this page if u look up 6260m it shows a firmware update fixing 8mb chunk transfers?

also it says the 6260 is intended for Win95 / Win98 / Win2000
surprising to see that it works under mac os 9..
are u saying that it works for booting aswell? or just data?

if it is a tempo card its by sonnet.. yes maybe manufactured by acard
but it is a sonnet.. here is the info : http://www.sonnettech.com/publicfiles/pdfs/pdf_datasheets/tempoa66_datasheet.pdf

[Protools5LEGuy]

This is the cheapest bootable card I know.

Put an fleabay alert on this name and you will find it.

[(S)ATAman]

http://www.acard.com/english/fc0101.jsp

on this page if u look up 6260m it shows a firmware update fixing 8mb chunk transfers?

also it says the 6260 is intended for Win95 / Win98 / Win2000
surprising to see that it works under mac os 9..
are u saying that it works for booting aswell? or just data?

if it is a tempo card its by sonnet.. yes maybe manufactured by acard
but it is a sonnet.. here is the info : http://www.sonnettech.com/publicfiles/pdfs/pdf_datasheets/tempoa66_datasheet.pdf

No, it's 100% ProMax, I mean, FT, pardon me - ACard. ACard "borrowed" the original idea from ProMax who marketed the grand-daddy of all ATA cards on the Mac.
By a chance, that card had ACard chipset because other cards at that time were much worse.
So what Acard did? They copy-cat the design. But at least they put a very good effort and their UATA 66 card was at least as good as the "original".
And they had the best UATA 66 chip. Recovery came only with UATA/100 and UATA/133 cards from Promise, the UATA/66 card from Promise was quite slow with Yosemite and Sawtooth.
For the Promise UATA/66 the first acceptable computer was the Digital Audio G4. But than as I remember, at least the UATA/100 or even the UATA/133 from Promise was there. And ACard fell somewhat behind. But ultimately they did a good job, even if to a large degree on the Mac it was a copy-cat job.

The first card really designed by Sonnet was the one based on Marvell 88SX6081. The chip itself is a bit over-engineered, but Sonnet had a genial software engineer who did the job afterwork. He surprised everyone. He was right because he was thinking that Vitesse controller would be very late. So the time Vitesse 7174 arrived for the Mac - Sonnet had their own, much better 88SX6081. And later on the even better 88SX7042 and 88SX6042 did literally tear the buggy SImage 3124 apart. Than, Sonnet lost the engineer to Apple and the time came for AHCI and Marvell 88SE9xxx. That's the life...