64 bits PCI on G4 working and confirmed!

[Protools5LEGuy]

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=569.0
Dane D. has the fastest G3 in Forum
G3s and G4 pci graphics have a CPU socket called "ZIF" zero insertion force"

The fastest upgrades in ZIF sockets are:

G3 at 1.1Ghz and at native (100 mhz) bus speed
G4 1.0 Ghz at 66 mhz bus speed (sonnet made a 66 bus hack to achieve this)
G4 550-600 Mhz at native speed

[Protools5LEGuy]

I tried 2 ATI rage 128 GL (pci 66MHz comp) on my g3 years ago, one in 66 bus and other on 33 bus standard.
My G3 B&W is a rev1. It does not support two drives on ATA33 bus (It corrupts data)
I bought my G3 with a sonnet tempo ATA66 card (acard card with other firmware and other label over the firmware)
Apple sponsorized the use of SCSI drives for servers on G3s as Steve Jobs said when releasing first iMac and first B&W keynote (In this keynote you could see a G3 B&W serving MacOS and  video to 16 iMacs without any hard drive)

[supernova777]

yes yes thats all fine ... but do u have a sil3112 card to try in this 66mhz slot???   
its sunday.. i was just about to go and buy some ssd to do the test with my acard card but i asked mactron a few questions and he didnt respond....
so i think maybe i will just buy 2 normal SATA3 80gb drives because they are cheap
they should be fast enough to saturate 133mbs+ when in dual raid .. (using the ACARD 6890M hardware raid for OS9... not softraid 2.2.2... I dont hvae this software even... noone has made the effort to share this for people on this site yet ...! but im hopign we can get a copy, i personally dont have it or know much about it..)

[supernova777]

ok so i bought 2 brand new sata3 spec 80gb drives .. they are seagate 7200.10 model
they arent ssd's but im hoping to see that whether or not i can get above 133mb/s with two drives combined..
this means the drives must at least be able to provide more then 66mb/s
given the fact that they are sata3 spec drives.. they should be able to saturate a sata150 card i thought..
which means i should theoretically get 133mb/s the max speed..

im not sure what mactron used to benchmark his transfers, so i will have to figure something out
if anyone knows what i can use to measure my disk transfer please respond!


seagate 7200.10 80GB SATA3 8mb cache
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148231
these are the drives

heres the card im going to use

acard 6890M

im going to be performing this test in my 867Mhz DP MDD

well... checking the specs of the drive
it says its only capable of giving 72mb/s...
so this might not be much of a test;)

Code: [Select]

Spindle speed (RPM) 7,200
Internal data transfer rate (Mbits/sec max) 1,030
Sustained data transfer rate OD (Mbytes/sec max) 72
I/O data-transfer rate (Mbytes/sec max) 300
ok im confused.. does this mean 72 .. or 300?
maybe it is 300...  i hope so.

anyways.. they were a steal at 14.99!!

i set the jumpers and immediately my system recognized the drive as one drive, and not two.. with a total capacity of 149GB
now i just need somehow to test the speed.. sure wish mactron had posted which software he used for this benchmark


is this what i should be using?
http://www.intechusa.com/HDInfo.html
i searched for hard disk benchmarking mac os 9 and this is what i found;)


this is interesting!

Intech's QuickStripe technology allows you to quickly setup any two hard disk drives which use the SCSI command set. This includes actual SCSI drives, ATA drives connected to most third-party PCI ATA host bus adapters, and FireWire drives which have the SpeedTools FireSCSI extensions installed.

http://www.intechusa.com/QS.html

for sure this will work for hd's connected to sil3112 + other sata cards because, in drive setup, i just saw it says SCSI in front of the drive..
shame if it doesnt work for the internal IDE ports!

[supernova777]

would be really great if someone could tel me what i can use to bench the disk speed?
im literally sitting here trying to figure it out.. so any help or advice would be appreciated thanks

---
ok i just used macbench 4.0
and my highest speeds were around 94mb/s i think
i will keep testing..
maybe i will back up the contents of my ssd's and use them for a test
if the top speed is 133mb/s then 94mb/s is  operating @ 70% of theoretical max

and if i apply the same math to mactron's findings
if the top speed is 266mb/s then 190mb/s is operating @ 71% of theoretical max

seems to be about right..
i wonder if using SSD's instead of SATA3 Seagate barracuda 7200.10 would make a difference..

update:
i just ran macbench on my other single sata drive which is connected to the SIL3112 card and the results are impressive
the speed is close to that of the dual disk on the acard... with the acard (striped raid) having alot of improvement on smaller size files
but the single disk actually beat the raid stripe for large sequential read.. by about 5mb/s
i will have to post a more detailed image to represent this data!

the biggest gains were random writes on small files with up to 185% performance of the single disk

[supernova777]

my results on macbench
red=single sata drive on 32bit/33mhz sil3112 controller (1s2 firmtek firmware)
yellow=2x sata drive RAID0 STRIPE on 32bit/33mhz acard 6890m
disregard the 6100 info its actually a DP 867mhz MDD








now after seeing these results
i have found some other articles that were negative reviews of this acard..
frm people looking for "best performance" they accused this acard card of being not a true
SATA solution. the accusation was that this card featured a IDE-SATA converter technology
and did not offer any gains on top of its previous IDE only adapter cards.

so although this card may not be best of the best. it is still hardware raid.. + mac os 9 compatible..
no software required for set up.. just set dipswitch + go.. which makes it still cool and especially very usefull for RAID1
even tho at the time of these tests i had it in a stripe configuration, my main reason for buying this card
was not for speed but for protection of my main boot drive to protect from disk failure.

[supernova777]

At least when it comes to tracking, im pretty sure that two PATA drives (preferably 7200rpm) is enough.
I have a 120gb 7200rpm for system and apps and one 250gb 7200rpm for audio and recording.

This is enough for me and my MDD to be able to record 64 mono tracks or 32 stereo tracks at the same time in 48khz and 24bit.
I have though about getting SSD's or RAID two rotating drives on a SATA card, but I can't justify it since what I have now works without any problems

Sorry If I went off topic, just wanted to share my experiences.

sharing experiences is never offtopic knez  thats what forums are for;)


ata33= pci powermac g4
ata66= most agp powermac g4 (http://tinyurl.com/kw9fjch " For PowerMac older than G4, AEC6260M can really boost the disk performance up to 100%. " LOL)
ata100= only the MDD models, and only one of the IDE controllers (Can officially support four internal hard drives -- two Ultra ATA/100 (ATA-6) and two Ultra ATA/66 (ATA-5))
ata133 =32bit ide ata-133 controller would be next (such as http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=715.msg2324#msg2324)
sata150=32bit controller (sil3112 short pci adapters) (such as http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=306.0)
sata150=64bit controller (seritek 1v4 etc) would be well off this graph... even higher!! BYALOT!
(as we saw with mactrons result of 190mb/s)

http://www.realworldtech.com/5400rpm-vs-7200rpm/2/
heres a "Real world" test

7200 ATA-66 | 5400 ata-100 | 7200 ata-100
57.8mb/s      | 76.7mb/s       | 81.2mb/s
these numbers are "Burst" on "win98se" via chipset not on a mac tho

this real world performance would put it on this graph above inbetween ata66 + ata100 "theoretical max values"

i believe that these drives you are talkign about.. 7200 RPM IDE drives..
are capable of higher speeds when connected to ATA133 controller
and given our info + findings on 32bit vs 64bit it makes sense now
that moving IDE controller to a 64bit-33mhz capable card
is something that may be both affordable + very very beneficial for the people
using ide hard drives... or even using new drive with sata-IDE bridge
this would allow for speeds much higher then 81mb/s I BELIEVE
even a 32bit ATA-133 controller should allow passing the ata-100 speeds

but your comment is 100% true! ata-100 is "Good enough"
but are we satisfied with good enough? or are we looking for "the best performance"
tracking is one thing.. loading of vsts + apps that are reliant on the loading of
large sample libraries.., this is the issue and reason for the search;)

[supernova777]

just bought on ebay
soon i will see the real potential of IDE 7200 on powermac g4 
same as mactron's firmtek.. 64bit.. up to 266mb/s due to downgrade from 66mhz to 33mhz operation in powermac g4 slot
Raid 0+1 would truely be the best of both worlds! protection + performance! amazing;) maybe the bst performance with this thing
could be 4 sata drives with sata-IDE adapters.. in RAID0+1.. i cant wait to get this;)

[supernova777]

this seritek card .. http://www.firmtek.com/seritek/seritek-1ve2plus2/spec/
it says it supports pci-x 133mhz (in a powermac g5)
so the top speed of this bus is:
PCI-X 133       1.067 GB/s

i wonder if this card in a g5 would peform between 533mb/s (PCI 64bit/66MHz) + the bus limitation of 1,06GB/s (pci-x 133mhz)

probably not because it only claims Data Transfer Rates :   

    Up to 150 MBytes/second or 1.5Gbits/second burst data transfer rate

or perhaps this speed is *per disk* as mactron got a speed of 190mb/s using 2 ssd...
what if u used it in a g5... with 4 ssd!!! lol
190mb/s divided by 2 is 80mb/s per port it seems to be capable of with a fast disk.. but that was on a pci 33mhz 64bit bus...
if u used pci 133mhz 64bit... how much per port would it be capable of then?
or the g5 also has 100mhz slot (PCI 64bit/100MHz   800 MB/s)
i would guess it probably can do 100mb/s per port..
if using all 4 maybe it can do 400mb/s but it would be cool if mactron has a g5 to test the real potential of this card on a faster mhz bus!!

[ELo]

Hi Chris, the for the pictures SATA card no longer show up.  Is this the same firmtek model as mactron's?  (I'm also looking for a SATA PCI-X card that can boot OS9)

Thanks,
Ed

just bought on ebay
soon i will see the real potential of IDE 7200 on powermac g4 
same as mactron's firmtek.. 64bit.. up to 266mb/s due to downgrade from 66mhz to 33mhz operation in powermac g4 slot
Raid 0+1 would truely be the best of both worlds! protection + performance! amazing;) maybe the bst performance with this thing
could be 4 sata drives with sata-IDE adapters.. in RAID0+1.. i cant wait to get this;)

[supernova777]

the pictures that arent showing up were of the Acard 6885M pci-x raid card. (64bits)

'same as mactrons'; meant that it is a 64bit pci-x card vs a normal pci 32bit 33mhz card

[ELo]

Cheers! 

 

the pictures that arent showing up were of the Acard 6885M pci-x raid card. (64bits)

'same as mactrons'; meant that it is a 64bit pci-x card vs a normal pci 32bit 33mhz card

[Yamaha8181]

Un bon sujet,m'aide résoudre beaucoup de problèm.

[Protools5LEGuy]

Un bon sujet,m'aide résoudre beaucoup de problèm.

google translate

A good story helps me solve a lot of Behavior .

[MacTron]

When a Hard Disk data transfer occurs, alongside the user data, some other data is transferred also (control data, address data, etc ) this usually use around 20% of bandwidth. That's why if we measure actual speed of file transfer over a ATA 100 the most we can expect is 80% of the ATA 100 speed (100MB/s), ie 80 MB per second.

I've used a SATA3 Samsung 840 EVO (Max Read = 540 MB/s Max Write = 410 MB/s)

http://www.samsung.com/uk/consumer/memory-cards-hdd-odd/ssd/840-evo/MZ-7TE120BW

In to some of my test, to avoid the limiting factor of the storage device.

But  according to this chart:



190 MB/s on raid mode is less than expected (230-244 MB/s) on the Seritek 64 bits card. Including the 20% of bandwith lost.

So what's the limiting factor now? And what we can learn on this?
The 410-540 MB/s of the SSD sure is not.
The 256 MB/s of the 64 bits PCI may be not.

In Raid Mode we surpass the 150MB/s of the SATA 1 speed. ie A raid of 2 HD (150+150 = 300 Mb/s) surpass the 64 bits PCI also.
Will the Seriteck chip capacity the limiting factor? probably yes.
Two Seriteck cards with a SSD each, in RAID mode would reach the MAX 64bits PCI bus (256 MB/s)?
Who have two 64bits Seritek cards?

A 64 bits data can be divided in high (32bits) and low (32bits) part. Can the 64 bits bus use the full bandwith (32+32 = 64 bits) even with 32 bits cards?
If this were true: Three Sil3112 with a SSD each, in RAID mode would reach the MAX 64bits PCI bus (256 MB/s)?

[supernova777]

On the other hand given the price of the seritek and the price of 2 SSD@120gb perhaps for a RAID setup is cheaper 2 (or 3) 33Mhz sil 3112 pci cards.

this is actually a very good pt.. without any flashing needed u can buy 2 x sil3112 cards and, at a cost of 2 pci slots.. u can achieve a similar 190mb/s speed that mactron achieved with one slot.... possibly even higher.. using 2 seperate cards..
which brings to mind .. what if u were to use 2 x 64bit cards?? in RAID0 so that it has the bandwidth of 2 64bit pci slots!!!!!!!!!

here we have uncovered a ghetto speed option for less then 30$ off ebay (for the cards at least, not the ssd! but 120gb ssd are more affordable now then ever!)

and a super speedy ultimate max that may be capable of clearing above mactrons record of 190mb/s!!!! using 2 64 bit cards...

i wonder if both cards would need to be bootable with a stripe raid 0 or if having one of the 64bit cards a seritek official card would be enuff to allow it to boot??

[MacTron]

... u can buy 2 x sil3112 cards and, at a cost of 2 pci slots.. u can achieve a similar 190mb/s speed that mactron achieved with one slot.... possibly even higher.. using 2 seperate cards ...

Yes, but the main point was already noted:

A 64 bits data can be divided in high (32bits) and low (32bits) part. Can the 64 bits bus use the full bandwith (32+32 = 64 bits) even with 32 bits cards?
If this were true: Three Sil3112 with a SSD each, in RAID mode would reach the MAX 64bits PCI bus (256 MB/s)?

Now I have two Sil3112 and two Samsung 120g SSD so ...  I could do the test to solve the question, "some day" may be ...

[supernova777]

just a quick note on the 6885M acard 64bits card.. this card will give u problems if u try to use it to boot mac os 8.6
it requires 9.0+

the 6880M card works with 8.6 
i learned this the hard way

[supernova777]

it would seem that 190MB/s must be the max for the g4 architecture.. because this is the same max that i saw on my 6885M with 2 drives.. i still have not tested 4 drives in raid on this controller.. but i have a feeling it might not go above 190MB/s

this would make sense as to why Firmtek/Seritek never made any SATA2 spec interfaces for the mac..(and any other manufacturer aswell) because its incapable of these speeds.. even with the 64bit extended pci

[MacTron]

it would seem that 190MB/s must be the max for the g4 architecture.. because this is the same max that i saw on my 6885M with 2 drives.. i still have not tested 4 drives in raid on this controller.. but i have a feeling it might not go above 190MB/s

this would make sense as to why Firmtek/Seritek never made any SATA2 spec interfaces for the mac..(and any other manufacturer aswell) because its incapable of these speeds.. even with the 64bit extended pci

That's exactly what I have thought when I have read about your Max transfer results.
This Max " efective throughput " about 190 MB/s is because hidden in the background there is a lot of control data that are "wasting" the remaining bandwidth, up to the theorical 266 MB/s Max. IMHO.