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Anyone tried the NanoTech Sata PCI card?

Website looks very sketchy, do not trust (eBay store linked to also shut down).

What IDE issues are you having? Rev A B&W don't like HDs on the slave but I've never had an issue with main boot drive on master and optical on slave.
 
MacOS works well enough as far as I can tell.
But it's dual-boot NetBSD 10.1 which crashes when I run rndctl -L and rndctl -S.
However, it doesn't crash running these commands on a RAM disk.
I also tried running the hard disk off the CDROM's IDE port, which I gather is not UDMA(?). And the problem seems to be resolved when the HDD is on the CD IDE port.

I've been messing with NetBSD kernel configuration options to disable UDMA but I'm not finished with this project yet.

Thus I've been looking into alternatives to the onboard IDE controller, such as a PCI IDE controller like the Acard 6XXXM cards or the Sonnet Trio/Tempo. Either IDE or SATA. I have an IDE drive. I'd have to buy a SATA drive were I to try a SATA card but that's OK.

I also looked at SCSI. I have a narrow SCSI PCI card in the Blue and White. I'm quite fond of SCSI having used it extensively in the 1990s and early 2000s, but nice narrow SCSI isn't exactly easy to find these days, and its expensive. But there's ZuluSCSI which uses an SD card and is fast SCSI (10 megabytes/second) which is slower than the B&W's Ultra ATA/33 but I could probably live with that.

I'm just pondering options right now. :)
 
If performance - go a SATA card and SSD, you remove the IDE and SCSI limitation. Rabbit hole computing sell a good card.
 
Initially I was a bit skeptical of that shop name, as it has that "generic scam shop name" vibe, but it seems they do sell the same items on eBay under that name:


That said, you're effectively paying $45 for them to flash a generic Chinese SiI3112 SATA card with the Classic Mac OS capable firmware, as these cards are less than $15 on eBay:


The only caveat is needing to flash it yourself, though this can be done within Mac OS these days with the custom ROM and patched flashing utility courtesy of @dosdude1:


The card does need to have an EEPROM that only needs 5V for programming and erasing, which a lot of EEPROMs do but some don't, and you don't necessarily know what you'd get.
Such an EEPROM would have to be replaced, which involves SMD soldering.

So the preflashed card is "safer", but you're paying quite the premium for it.
I would definitely suggest going through eBay instead of their own store, to have extra buyer's protection, just in case.

EDIT: You could also try getting a quality Adaptec 1210AS SiI3112 based card, for probably less than the preflashed generic SiI3112 card.
You do need to disable or remove a small SOIC8 chip, but otherwise should be flashable using the utility.

If you are comfortable soldering, you could put a solder blob across the four legs on both sides of the chip, then heat those until both are molten simultaneously, allowing you to pull it off.
But you could also just lift pin 8 (VCC), or even use thin side cutters (the type used to cut leads after soldering) and just snip that pin, or even just all pins to remove it entirely, any of that should do the trick.

See also @Carlito's posts about this:


The Adaptec card is of much better quality, so this can be worth the hassle.
I have one myself and it works great, all the way down to Mac OS 7.5 (the earliest Classic Mac OS available on PCI Macs).
 
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MacOS works well enough as far as I can tell.
But it's dual-boot NetBSD 10.1 which crashes when I run rndctl -L and rndctl -S.
However, it doesn't crash running these commands on a RAM disk.
I also tried running the hard disk off the CDROM's IDE port, which I gather is not UDMA(?). And the problem seems to be resolved when the HDD is on the CD IDE port.

I've been messing with NetBSD kernel configuration options to disable UDMA but I'm not finished with this project yet.

Thus I've been looking into alternatives to the onboard IDE controller, such as a PCI IDE controller like the Acard 6XXXM cards or the Sonnet Trio/Tempo. Either IDE or SATA. I have an IDE drive. I'd have to buy a SATA drive were I to try a SATA card but that's OK.

I also looked at SCSI. I have a narrow SCSI PCI card in the Blue and White. I'm quite fond of SCSI having used it extensively in the 1990s and early 2000s, but nice narrow SCSI isn't exactly easy to find these days, and its expensive. But there's ZuluSCSI which uses an SD card and is fast SCSI (10 megabytes/second) which is slower than the B&W's Ultra ATA/33 but I could probably live with that.

I'm just pondering options right now. :)
It's the running NetBSD that maybe untested.

I bought one of these cards on eBay pre-flashed and it had a mod to the voltage IC that was supposed to make it compatible with the PowerMac G4 Quicksilver.

The mod made the card unstable and unusable in any computer. I ended up replacing the voltage IC and it works well now, it just won't work in a G4 Quicksilver.

Buying the generic card and flashing it yourself is appealing, but you never know if the generic card is going to have an EEPROM that is compatible with the flashing of the Mac FCode ROM.

We could go on for pages about all the crazy ins and outs of the Sil3112 cards, but unless someone has tried it in a B&W with NetBSD we really can't offer much advice, you'll just have to order one and give it a go.
 
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