ATA PCI Card

[haemogoblin]

Hi there

Lately I've been having issues with copying files from CD to HD and I think it might finally be time to swap from SCSI to IDE. Was hoping someone might be able to direct me to a card that will do the job.

I dont want SATA, just plain old ATA, i've loads of old drives at hand, so would like to utilize what I've have already/

Many thanks

 

[Unknown_K]

ACARD made some (AEC-6280M to name one). They come in ATA-66 to 133 speeds.

 

[Byrd]

I'd be checking the CD drive over all else - laser fatigue is common in these old drives and read errors will result

 

[Elfen]

ACARD made some (AEC-6280M to name one). They come in ATA-66 to 133 speeds.

Dumb Question - is it Mac Compatible?

I've got a lot of ATA-PCI cards but I have yet to see one work for the Mac.

 

[waynestewart]

I have a couple of ACARD ata-66, one ata-100 and 0ne ata-133. They all worked on the Mac with hard drives but I've never tried them with an optical drive.

I have tried a SCSI to ide adapter with an optical drive with success.

ACARD did make pci cards for both the Mac and PC so you'd want to make sure you got a Mac card

 

[Unknown_K]

The M on the end means MAC.

 

[haemogoblin]

Hi guys

The current setup in the 8500, has an 80gb Seagate ultra scsi installed with a converter and then on the end of the cable is the stock optical 8x?? speed drive.

I tried copying some files off CD to the HD and the darn thing kept on locking up a quarter of the way through copying. I tried burning the CD at a slower speed, down to 4x, but it didn't seem to help. Oddly however, copying the folders off the disk individually did work, instead of trying to select them all at once.

I'm wondering if A. The termination is not right or B. The drive is on the way out (but this is the firs disk thats caused me issue). I was thinking that perhaps going IDE might improve performance.

 

[Elfen]

What Burning software are you using? If it is Adaptec Toast & Jam, turn on "Avoid Burn OverRun" and it might help.

Another is take out that drive, rip it apart and clean & lube the rails and the laser head drive screw. While you're at it you can check if the controller board is SCSI terminated.

 

[haemogoblin]

I'm using Toast on my 1.33Ghz iBook, I'll check the setting thanks!

I'll see if i have a spare drive, before taking this one apart. I want a backup plan, in the event things go south.

 

[haemogoblin]

I checked out the prices of ACARD's on eBay, taking in to account the chance I could end up with a non compatible card. I've decided to settle on using SCSI or Ultra SCSI drives in the Powermac.

Thanks guys for helping me out on this, I've still a couple of problems with this system I need to address, but it'll do for another thread.

 

[trag]

I have a couple of ACARD ata-66, one ata-100 and 0ne ata-133. They all worked on the Mac with hard drives but I've never tried them with an optical drive.

I have a DVD-ROM drive on the aec-6280m in my Umax S900. It's been working great for years.

 

[haemogoblin]

Thanks for that Trag, do you still use SCSI in your Umax? My intention would be to completely replace my SCSI drives with IDE devices. It certainly would be a lot easier to source drives.

 

[l008com]

I've been looking for one of these cards for my 7300 too. I have yet to find one anywhere, let alone at a reasonable price. I have this 10K SCSI drives that's super loud, I'd much rather replace it with a modern quiet IDE drive, possibly even a laptop drive. And my optical drive is also crapping out, and I want to be able to read DVDs as well. I have stacks of old IDE optical drives and hard drives. So a good price on one of these cards would be great. 

I'm also a little confused on how these work. Don't many of them work by pretending to be a SCSI bus? If that's the case, would they work with any version of Mac OS, without drivers? Even 7.5.5 for example? 

 

[ziggy29]

Well, "reasonable price" is subjective.  Some people think more than $20 is not reasonable; others more motivated may say $50 is reasonable. 

That said, in theory if the PCI bus works properly (and the card does) an IDE drive can be seen as a SCSI drive by these older PCI Power Macs.  And they don't need drivers, at least the ones I've seen.  The Sonnet Tempo cards, probably the gold standard where this is concerned, should "just work" when plugged in.  I have a Sonnet Tempo HD card in my 7600.  It has a place to mount a 2.5" hard drive (I have an mSATA SSD with adapter there) and to hook a cable into two more IDE drives.  It works perfectly without any additional software, and the Mac sees it as if it were on a second SCSI bus.  I've run that from everything from 7.5.5 to Tiger, so yeah, IMO it should work.

 

[l008com]

That's great, just what I wanted to hear as far as compatibility. And I know Sonnet is "top of the line", I had sonnet cards back in the day. And I've half-assedly been looking for a Tempo Trio for this Mac for a while. But I haven't been able to find anything for sale anywhere unfortunately. Eventually I'll post in the classifieds section but I wanted to get my post count up a bit first. As far as price, I'd probably pay $20 without hesitating. I probably wouldn't pay $50. 

 

[l008com]

...in theory if the PCI bus works properly ... an IDE drive can be seen as a SCSI drive by these older PCI Power Macs.

Since you have direct first hand experience with this, have you ever put a modern IDE optical drive on such an IDE PCI card? And if so, was it able to boot off System 7, OS 8, OS 9 etc discs? And read DVDs properly on these old OSes? (data DVDs I mean, not looking for video DVD playback)

 

[ziggy29]

I haven't used an IDE optical drive, no.  I'm pretty sure it will work but whether it's bootable, I have no clue.

 

[Unknown_K]

They should be bootable (from what I remember on my 8500 anyway).

 

[haemogoblin]

Returning to this, I have to say I'm now wondering if going IDE might be better then keeping with SCSI