Quick question that i havent been able to find an answer for...
I've recently obtained another Sawtooth. The Secondary IDE connector appears to no longer function. I also would like to put one or two 300gig hard drives in it to use as an mp3 and file server. Upgrading the Processor to be able to handle that task is no problem at all. However, I need Large Volume Support (for drives over 128gig.
I was wondering if the tempo trio would meet my needs?
I need a card that will allow: ATA133 with Large Volume Support (or SATA, doesnt matter to me really), I need to be able to boot from the card also obviously, and I need to be able to Connect my DVD drive to it so that it is also bootable (Pioneer DVR-110, recognized by my machine as apple shipped and supported, and it does boot fine off of this drive when connected via a firewire enclosure... bu i want it back in the case.)
All the info i've been able to find on this card just says that it can boot from any attached hard drive... so i dont know about the DVD drive? I was going to call them and ask, but the whole east coast / west coast time difference thing... lol.
If someone recomennds an SATA card, i'd have to get new Hard Drives (no big deal), but I dont know about the DVD drive... im assuming that someone manhufactures an adapter to convert PATA devices to work on SATA?
thanks in advance.
/Bill
well, I just gave them a call and he said that no one has ever asked about DVD drive booting from the card. He checked his specs, and told me that his specs say that when using OSX it "should" support it, and that his personal opinion is that it would "probably" work under OS9 as well... neither of those statements is confirmation, but at least he did confirm that if I buy from them and the card doesnt do what I want then they have a 30 day return policy and i could send it back to them.
Any one elses opinion on the Trio card?
ok, i guess ill just have to spe3nd the money myself and find out. lol.
dude, my suggestion is to go with sata because its soooo much faster than ata
Its not that much faster, especially on and older Mac.
ok, so after i got the "um... it should work, the box says so.." from one of the "techs" at sonnet, I saved my pennies and bought the Tempo Trio card... I waited quite a while to recieve it and... um...nope.
doesnt really work at all.
my situation was that i needed to a controller to
enable large volume support, and (B) alow me to boot off of an attached DVD drive.
I tried the card with the Pioneer - Apple superdrive (recognized by OSX as apple shipped/supported, in this machine in previous configurations) and my 300GB maxtor hard drive (same seris as the 80GB that has been the boot drive for the last year.)
CONFIGURATIONS TRIED:
1. Trio Primary Channel, HD set as master - Trio Secondary Channel Superdrive set to master.
2. Trio Primary Channel Superdrive set as master, Trio Secondary channel HD set as master.
3. Trio Primary Channel HD set as master, Superdrive set as slave.
4. Trio Primary channel, OLD BOOT DISK (80gb) set to master, no super drive.
In configuration #4, the sawtooth DID boot up off of the old OS install problem free... seemed SLOWER however... even though the HD is an ATA133 drive, and the controller is supposed to "enable ATA133 speeds", also with this set up trying to play back AVI files of "Lost" were almost entirely unwatchable - with a great deal of stuttering - they played back flawlessly with the same drive attached to the onboard ATA66 connection.
In configurations 1, 2, and 3 the machine would ONLY boot off of the DVD drive when there was no bootable sector on the HD... no matter which channel things were connected to. Also, when running tiger install disc system profiler reported NO burning devices at all. and nothing showed up under ATA. Trying to install Tiger from the attached DVD drive to the HD was completley unsuccesful. Someone has taken my Tiger install DVDs, and all i had to work with was the 4 cd set. After using disk utility to zero and partition the 300gb drive i started the install (note this same process was done with all of the first 3 listed configurations) It would go through disc one, restart the machine, boot off of the HD and prompt for disc 2, it would go through disc two prompt for three, after running disc 3 for a while (oh, did i mention that to get to disc 3 took about an hour each time?) my machine would say "There were errors in the installation process Try again" or some other such nonesense... it would dump me out and prompt for disc 2 again... and do the disc 2 - disc 3 thing ad nauseum.
Also, checking sonnets "tiger Compatibility" list on their site, it now DOESNT list the tempo trio... but at least one person ive seen on the internet has confirmed running and upgrading to 10.4.7 on his tempo trio card.
Im so sick of being lied to... and this is the SECOND sonnet product that has not performed as it should have. I will not be buying any sonnet products ever again.
Does anyone have any further suggestions?
thanks again,
Bill
I've got a Sonnet Tempo Trio that I bought about three years ago. I've moved it from a beige G3 to a B&W to a Digital Audio G4, and it's always been super reliable.
One thing I've been very disappointed about is the ATA throughput. Although Sonnet claims that the card gives you ATA/133 speeds, I'm definitely finding it much slower than that, and benchmarks using Maxtor 7200 RPM 8 MB cache ATA/133 drives shows speeds not much faster than about ATA/33 speeds.
The USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 ports have been just fine, however, and provide the expected transfer rates from similarly spec'ed external drives.
The Tempo Trio is completely bootable for me for hard drives, though admittedly I haven't tried using a CD, DVD, or other removable media drive with it.
All Mac ATA cards emulate SCSI contollers to the host system, so the hard drives appear to be on a SCSI bus when looking in Apple System Profiler. I also seem to recall that IDE drives formatted when connected to the Mac's built-in IDE controller will not function correctly when connected to the PCI ATA controller and vice versa (something about the way the ATA emulates a SCSI controller that affects how it formats drives).
Unfortunately, I cannot comment on 10.4 compatibility as all my Macs are still running 10.3.x (I'm about one decimal point behind in the upgrade cycle on purpose). Generally, though, I've been highly satisified with Sonnet products. I've got a 1 GHz G4 ZIF in the B&W that I picked up from Sonnet, and when I had trouble installing OS X on my biege G3 (with the Tempo Trio, a Jackhammer U2 SCSI card, a Radeon 9200, and the 1 GHz G4 at the time), the Sonnet techs were very helpful in helping me diagnose the problem. It turned out to be a very obscure OpenFirmware issue relating to OS X's use of OF for boot vars and the PCI cards (the Temp Trio and ATI card in particular) using compressed OF vars that eventually overflowed the OF memory space. It took nearly a week of daily emails to figure it out, but they did help me get it figured out. So stick with it is all I can say. Keep sending them emails until you get a tech that seems to know what he's talking about (none of this "golly, I think so, maybe" bull).
If only one of your on-board IDE controllers is shot, why can't you just host your hard drives via the PCI card and leave your DVD drive connected to the other on-board IDE controller?
Peace,
Drew
Sucess... mostly.
I managed to recover my OSX Tiger Install DVD.... it would seem the majority of my problem was a bad set of tiger CD's got everything installed running the Superdrive as master on the machines original Master (Hard Drive) IDE Channel, and the 300gig HD attached to the Primary channel of the Tempo Trio card.
Just finished updating to 10.4.8
Tomorrow I'll figure out how I want everything to go together and then I will have a story to submit.
/Bill