Disk Speed Upgrades (aka The Bootable PCI SATA & SSD thread)

[Pushpull76]

Just bought a Tempo Sata X4p for experiments and modifications.
I'll change for sure the connectors (I'll add 4 internal serial ata connectors instead of the external ones) and I'll check if macos 9 can boot. Later, I'll check for the chipset and the ROM content.

[Pushpull76]

Can someone post for me the exact codes/photos of the original seritek roms ? To be honest, instead of find a firmware programmer, I think I can simply buy a batch of 10/20 chipset compatible cards, swap the rom chips and sell them to you all.
Tell me if you are interested.

[IIO]

in my opinion it would even make a lot of sense if it was not bootable.

(best option to boot is a small SSD with a 3 euro adapter from ATA the 100 controller of the 2001 - mdd macs; in te case of quicksilver you easily get that SSD in the case in addition to 4 3,5" HDDs)

it just has to work properly in OS9 - including a simple to use option to update the firmware / reflash it for everyone - and people will buy it.

isnt the X4 a bit too pricey as basis? for what do you think you could offer modified cards?

[Pushpull76]

in my opinion it would even make a lot of sense if it was not bootable.

(best option to boot is a small SSD with a 3 euro adapter from ATA the 100 controller of the 2001 - mdd macs; in te case of quicksilver you easily get that SSD in the case in addition to 4 3,5" HDDs)

it just has to work properly in OS9 - including a simple to use option to update the firmware / reflash it for everyone - and people will buy it.

isnt the X4 a bit too pricey as basis? for what do you think you could offer modified cards?

I bought the X4 because I need it under mac os X on a G4 MDD; I'm curious to see if a drive or raid formatted with the os9 compatibility flag will work under os9, which is present on my G4 on another drive. The chipset on the X4 is probably a Marvell one; don't know how many cards around have the same chipset.

The idea is to buy some cards, which we know are compatible at 100% with the Firmtek chipset, unsolder the rom, put a plcc32 socket on the board and insert the rom which we know is compatible with the firmtek updater. I think we are in the range of 25-30 euro for a card. I'm doing some experiments with scrappy cards here to see if it can be done without problems.

[macStuff]

your best bet (highest rate of success) would be to find more sil3112 cards someplace

[Pushpull76]

your best bet (highest rate of success) would be to find more sil3112 cards someplace

I bought from Amazon this card



The chipset is ok and I can buy them in good quantities. The only doubt I have is on the ROM chip position.
As you can see from the image, there are small components around, exactly where I wanna put a socket for the ROM. I have probably to solder the new chip directly on the board.

[IIO]

the final product should in all cases support JBOD

[Pushpull76]

It seems someone is already producing a batch :-D

https://www.ebay.it/itm/2-Port-SATA-PCI-Controller-Card-Apple-Macintosh-PowerMac-G3-G4-G5-SSD-OSX-OS-9/264403383346?hash=item3d8fab7432:g:7csAAOSwgYpdMbyJ

[IIO]

1s2 ... "not compatible with quicksilver"

damn.

[vectrex]

I recognize this is off topic but,

Also curious that the same seller listed above has a 256mb Nvidia card listed as compatible with OS 9 (No 3D accel):

https://www.ebay.com/itm/nVidia-Geforce-5200-256mb-AGP-Video-Card-For-Apple-PowerMac-G4-G4-Cube-VGA-x2/264411989688

they are also listing the radeon 9700 128mb here:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ATi-Radeon-9700-PRO-128mb-AGP-Video-Card-For-Apple-PowerMac-G4-G5-AGP-OS-9/264514597602?hash=item3d964c72e2:g:gPMAAOSw7iZdt-cr

[Pushpull76]

Update : I received the PCI card and, surprise, the chipset is Silicon Image 3512, not 3112.
As far as I know, the 3512 chipset is a revised version of the 3112, so....as I already wrote, I will try to solder the socket and put the new rom before try to update it with the seritek firmware. Let's see what happens....

(positive thing: the rom has no smd components around, so I can simply manage to solder the PLCC32 socket).

[IIO]

I recognize this is off topic but,

Also curious that the same seller listed above has a 256mb Nvidia card listed as compatible with OS 9 (No 3D accel):

he also has usb enclosures labelled as "firewire 400" ... as always, use ebay with caution

but it is great that someone at least cares about our retro OS and offers such cards.

[Pushpull76]

I recognize this is off topic but,

Also curious that the same seller listed above has a 256mb Nvidia card listed as compatible with OS 9 (No 3D accel):

he also has usb enclosures labelled as "firewire 400" ... as always, use ebay with caution

but it is great that someone at least cares about our retro OS and offers such cards.

Honestly....they don't care about retrocomputing at all. They simply stole works done by other from forums and groups and they try to gain money, that's simple. As you can see, they want 50$ from a card that, in quantity, you can pay under 10$; a compatible rom, if needed, is under 3$. Solder the new rom and put on the new firmware is something you can do in half an hour. I already seen this stuff around; a complete ripoff of a dac converter built by a guy on a public forum.....sold by chinese vendors at a price which is a 1/3 of the original one.

[IIO]

yes of course is it only a business for them, but as you say, it is 30 minutes work and the 45 euros would include shipping within europe - i would get one if it would support my QS machines.

no doubt i´d rather buy from you.

[Pushpull76]

Works started, first check of the pinouts of the rom chips.
They are phisically interchangeable for sure but some pins of the original memory are NC (pin 1 and 30); on the bigger rom chip are adress lines A17 and A18. Vcc is 5 volts, so no problems here (some chips run on 3.3 volts).

[Pushpull76]

On SiI 3512 chip, the address lines to check are pin 55-56.

[DieHard]

I am very curious if this end up to be an OS9 solution... Surprised Macstuff has not responded

[(S)ATAman]

for those who were reading the thread above.. the user named widter has informed me that he has no intention of making his firmware hack public now or in the future.. so the search continues.. hopefully i wont give up + ill eventually be able to find someone whos capable of backward engineering the firmware or downsizing it to fit a normal/common size rom chip

1) I have absolutely no need to reverse-engineer it. Guess, why...
2) You can't fit it in a smaller chip. The exceptions are the ATA cards. And that simply because hot-swap is not supported in the standard ATA. So the ATA code is much smaller than SATA.

[macStuff]

it was always theorized that the chips included kexts for osx that might be removed to remove the footprint of the rom, sacrificing dual osx/os9 compatibility for simple os9 compatibility without having to solder a new chip

[(S)ATAman]

it was always theorized that the chips included kexts for osx that might be removed to remove the footprint of the rom, sacrificing dual osx/os9 compatibility for simple os9 compatibility without having to solder a new chip

I often use LZARI to compress the "9" driver (SIM) and most of the FCode.
It's evil to have a self-modifying code, but it's even more evil not to have anything at all.

The 3124 code is compressed (this is why you won't see much dumping the ROM) and so is the Promise 20268/20269.

The 3124 code remains compressed, but it won't be copy-protected at all.
The reason is to prevent gentleman like our favorite seller from HK officially benefit from the new code, patching what is inside of the ROM.
The Promise code always has to be compressed because the space is ridiculously small.

What is sacrificed is in the first line the PC BIOS, the rest is as it has to be, but no cut (even the BIOS) is welcome.
The BIOS itself can be confusing because many have "software RAID" capability.

I think one should rather go with the (software) RAID from either Intel or SoftRAID.

And from all kind of RAID the easiest + safest is arguably the RAID 10, maybe 50 or 60.
I am using a pair of RAID-10 at both homes, both largely mirrored (except of course the latest stuff).

These RAID-10s are on NAS from Thecus, but I am looking forward to make Marvell SAS chips (inside of Thecus boards) work on "X" or just find the Thecus board with SImage 3132 chips, these would work if the Thecus is converted to a "Hackintosh".