The Serial ATA ( SATA ) options -In brief-

[MacTron]

Nowadays the Serial ATA ( SATA ) devices ( CD/DVD ROMS, and Hard Disks ) are easy to find and usually cheaper newer and faster than the old Parallel ATA ( PATA ). But none Mac Os Classic computers have included " out of the box " SATA capabilities.

To add SATA devices in our Macs we have two options:
A PATA to SATA converter, that convert the standard parallel ATA ports into a new SATA ports:


This is the cheap solution (3$ -10$), but it is limited to PATA speed. However for slow devices like CD/DVD drivers is the best solution.

The other option is to add a PCI card that adds several SATA ports to our computer:


There is only a few SATA PCI cards that have support for Mac Os 9 booting. The faster ones are the 64 bits (PCI-X) from FirmTek. They were made with four internal ( SeriTek/1V4 ) or four external ports ( SeriTek/1eVE4 ) and with two internal and two external ports (SeriTek/1eVE2+2)

The Sil3112 based cards appears in several ways. The SeriTek/1S2, the rebranded Sonnet's Tempo Serial ATA PCI, and the PC Sil3112 modded with Mac Os 9 boot EEPROM.

In the picture below we can see the different results in max transfer speed (read and write).


Another option is the Acard 6290M, but is not included in to this picture.
This card perform worse than the SIL3112 based and very near to the SATA to PATA adapter results.