Sata Controller for Beige G3

[Angel]

Wandering here and there, now i want add a sata controller to Beige and i saw this Sonnet Tempo™ Serial ATA PCI. Obviously it's out of stock and i can imagine if i found it somewhere, it wont cheap.
Like usb card i should try to mount every controller i can find but i think i will lose only a lot of time. Sadly the Tempo Card doesn't indicate what chipset uses so i can try with a similar card of another company. Do you know who made it ? Is it a Sil 3112 or something else ? Thx

[IIO]

the sonnet tempo sata PCI was a SeriTek 1s2 and the only place to buy a new one is firmtek - for fantasy prices - and i dont link to it now because the website seems to be down since 3 days. (hopefully not forever?)

they boot back to OS 7.1 i think, so you can say it will work in every mac with PCI.

in the beiges & artemis´using a PCI card is probably the only useful option, in machines with ATAx i would otherwise have recommended you to use some 3 dollars adapter and a 2,5" medium.

[teroyk]

firmtek - for fantasy prices - and i dont link to it now because the website seems to be down since 3 days. (hopefully not forever?)

they boot back to OS 7.1 i think, so you can say it will work in every mac with PCI.

Damm..I just thinking to buy SATA-card. And you even gave me one more reason to buy, it would be quite jump with PowerMac 9500,

[Angel]

The are a lot of reason for upgrading:

1- Nobody makes anymore IDE drives.
2- If someone did them they would be too big for internal ata controller (same with SATA drives attached with adapters)
3- Old IDE drives are used, probably half broken, not reliable. New from old stocks: same story.
4- CF Card with adapter cost too much and it's small. I've already tried this way with an another mac: spent a lot for only 4GB...
5- SSD option (but how much can survive without trim support ?)

[IIO]

you dont really need trim enabled, unreadable sectors will end up in the HFS catalog (or however that is correctly called), too, just like with disks.

if there was a scsi2sata adapter then it would be a nice upgrade to use an ssd as boot drive. of course in a beige one wont ever need the space or speed a modern NAND offers.

btw: where would you put 2 drives in the machine? didnt they have only one slot?

[DieHard]

Hey there is always SCSI to SATA, but now it's $2000, adapt the 50 pin G3 internal
https://www.ebay.com/itm/ACARD-ARS-2160H-Ultra160-SCSI-to-SATA-II-Bridge-Box-80-Pin/263823727507?hash=item3d6d1e9b93:g:pIYAAOSw34FVGeK7:sc:UPSGround!92544!US!-1

This one, by Hantz, looks identical
http://highper.com/Produktbeschreibungen/SCSISA2.5U.pdf

It is so depressing, we really need to find a cheap SCSI to SATA solution guys

[IIO]

how could i forget this, it is on top of my to buy list, lol.

[IIO]

well, actually that brings up another idea.

if he can use only one HD anyway, he could use a firewire PCI card.

there are several models which also have one internal fw-400 connector.

2,5" firewire to sata enclosure and there we go.

[Angel]

btw: where would you put 2 drives in the machine? didnt they have only one slot?

There are three spaces:

1st, original, near CPU (removed HD from here and put a fan 4x4cm because sudden power off by overheating/temp sensor damaged)
2nd and 3rd, zip drive area. Now the hard drive is here.

Another advantage about sata are the small cables: IDEs block air movement

adapt the 50 pin G3 internal

The G3 SCSI is almost bad: only 8MB/s good for Scanner and Tape Devices. There would be good an USB2-SCSI Converter but every piece of HW with the SCSI word is expensive by definition

[Angel]

Anyhow it seems more difficult find this card than usb one so i will choose the simple way with a simple adapter.
On lowendmac i have read there are various problems with big hard drives in particular something about a 8GB (8192MB o less ?) limit where must stay all system files (macosx too, i had it too), otherwise i will get strange behaviors (crash ? not funny bombing jokes ?).
There is obviously an upper limit about dimensions, i don't remember if it is 120 or 128GB. What happens if i add a bigger drive ?
I will read al least the first 128GB o there will are another jokes ?

[IIO]

usb is probably not what you want it will slow things down compared to scsi-2

yep, that might be that this machine also wants you to limit the boot partition to 8 gb, i dont know offhand.

you can always use the first 120/137 gb if a drive is bigger.

[Angel]

you can always use the first 120/137 gb if a drive is bigger.

But how i know if i'am inside it ? If i go over the limit can i risk go to something like overflow with storaged data and overwrite something important ?

[IIO]

that is nothing the user has to take care of.

with one exception: if there is already bigger partitions than your controller can handle on a disk when you put it in the machine, it wont be able to read it.

otherwise, just format the bigger disk in that computer and it will work as small disk.

[refinery]

beige g3 needs its OS on its own partition within the 8GB limit. you can use larger drives; you just have to partition the first drive as 8GB and install the OS on it.
you will still be limited to 120GB total, unless you use the 3rd party driver for large drive support over 128GB.

TRIM is not that big of an issue but if you're really concerned with it, buy a drive with over-provisioning which is how the problem was handled before the days of TRIM. Look for drives slightly smaller in capacity to the "normal" sizes, i.e. 120GB vs 128GB, 60GB vs 64GB, etc... those are over-provisioned drives. Basically what over-provisioning is, it allocates a section of the drive as "not usable" and shuffles data around on the drive transparently to prevent a certain cell from being written to more often than other cells on the drive, which will reduce its lifespan.


its also important to note, that this is *ONLY* applicable when you are using the internal IDE bus. it does not apply if you are using an add-in IDE/SATA card, since those drives present themselves as SCSI devices which are not subject to the drive size limitation issues.

[Angel]

Thx i will look for a 120GB. The os first partition must be maximum 8192 MB (8GB) or smaller ? Realistically, if i put all my applications in an another partition, how many GB are really needed for a good and reliable os9 installation (system plus  extensions, control panels, other various thing not placeable elsewhere...) ?

[IIO]

for a plain OS9 folder 0,5 are fine.

but there are a few additional things which may only be placed into the systemfolder, too:

MAS plug-ins
RTAS/TDM plug-ins
Altiverb IRs
Fonts (including those which are in a "disabled" folder)

even if you use all of that you should still be fine with 5,0 for the rest of your life.