MDD G4 - LBA, IDE and SATA questions

[wood_e]

I just picked up a decent Dual 867 MDD G4 at goodwill for $75. I figured I can make this into a decent file server.

I actually have a copy of Leopard server I might throw on it, but it has leopard client on it right now.

Anyway - I'm thinking of turning this into a file server & media player. I think the max storage I'll need is probably 500GB.

1) I would guess the MDD supports LBA IDE drives, correct?

2) IDE drives top out at 500GB or so - why?

3) Would it be a good idea to get a SATA card and run SATA drives? What's the advantage?

TIA!

 

[MacJunky]

1) I would guess the MDD supports LBA IDE drives, correct?

If you can find a PATA drive, the MDD can take it.

2) IDE drives top out at 500GB or so - why?

Ooooolllllddddd. From what I recall SATA was starting to be fairly popular in 2003/04. Given that is it 2010 now.. yea. Old.

3) Would it be a good idea to get a SATA card and run SATA drives? What's the advantage?

You can boot off some SATA cards! Biggest advantage would be capacity, being able to use new drives and easily replace them later with new drives(new also means they should be quiet compared to older worn drives), If you have the right card the speed should be fairly decent.

 

[Mars478]

I think IDE drives top out at 750GB.

But yes everything should work.

 

[johnklos]

IDE drives top out at 750 gigs for no technical reason - the market just went to SATA.

Finding bootable SATA cards which just work isn't easy. It'd be a lot better to get a $15 USD SATA drive to IDE bus adapter and put it on a SATA drive. I'm doing this with one of my machines with a 1 terabyte SATA drive. Even in the older style G4 enclosure, there's still room for the adapter on the back. On the MDD, you'll have plenty of space. Plus, the IDE bus is pretty darned fast, faster than you'll typically get on a PCI card.

A MDD definitely supports drives larger than 128 gig.

 

[Paralel]

I'd be careful going the SATA-to-IDE adapter route. It's uncommon, but there have been instances where the adapters are not 100% compatible with a given drive, resulting in unrecoverable data corruption, kernel panics, boot failures, etc...

 

[MacJunky]

Finding bootable SATA cards which just work isn't easy.

You need a card that makes use of the 64bit PCI slot for best performance.In my G4 I use a flashed cheap Sil3512 card(flashed using my Mac btw). I can boot OS X off it too.

My card is only 33MHz 32bit; though it is faster than the onboard PATA of my Digital Audio. A MDD has faster PATA and could probably beat my card but I would not actually be upset about using it over the onboard PATA due to the other significant advantages.

but then, you know, I am a sucker for being able to use cheap new hardware in old systems as well as nice thin single platter drives in applications where I do not need a super crazy fast drive.

 

[wood_e]

any info on which cards can be flashed?

 

[MacJunky]

Sil3512 can be. If their rom is stored on a flashable chip. I have a really cheap possibly shady one from a bargain bin in Japan with very few markings on it and it does not flash but the "store brand" one I got from NCIX worked just fine. I am betting the house brand Newegg ones would work too. *shrug*

There might be potential for Sil3112 cards but I have never looked into it much so YMMV.

The Sil3512 is not really the greatest chipset and my card does not support hotswap it seems but I still like it more than the onboard PATA in my G4. Not like G4s can reasonably push all that much data anyway. :-/

Here is my original post about the solution I went with for SATA in my G4:

http://forums.applecentral.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/477040/Flashed_Sil3512_info

 

[Anonymous Freak]

As for the adapters, the kind that let you put a PATA drive on a SATA computer are significantly more reliable than the other way 'round.

Yes, there are ones to put SATA drives on PATA computers, but they tend to be a bit flaky in practice.

 

[Bunsen]

The onboard PATA bus can do 133MHz/channel, so unless you really need more than 1.5TB of storage you should be set. You could even do set up a software RAID in Disk Utility for extra speed and/or security.

A hardware SATA RAID controller on the other hand would take some load off the CPU, compared to a software RAID - but if the box is intended to just be a server, then serving (and RAIDing) will be all it has to do, so CPU load shouldn't be an issue, really. And finding a bootable or flashable RAID card will no doubt be harder or more expensive than a straight SATA card.

NB if you have an ATAPI DVD/CD on the same PATA channel as an HD, I hear it slows the HD down. Someone will no doubt correct or clarify this statement if needed

Consider also a Firewire 800 card and Firewire-SATA bridges.

 

[johnklos]

It's not hard to find decent SATA drive to PATA bus adapters. Whether or not some are flakey, plenty are just fine. I'm using several - one is on a PowerMac G4 with a 1 TB drive, another on a SCSI-IDE adapter with a 2 TB drive, and no problems with both long uptime, busy systems.

If you're worried about flakiness, just do some Googling.

BTW - only with really old drives does the lower speed of two devices on an IDE channel matter. On a modern system with a halfway recent drive (any DVD drive will be new enough), two devices will be clocked independently of each other, so one drive will only affect the other in terms of taking time away that could be used for transferring.

A simple example: if an IDE bus has two devices, one capable of UDMA-33 and the other UDMA-100, then a UDMA-33 bus transferring at 16 MB/sec would take half the time of the bus, leaving the UDMA-100 bus able to transfer up to 50 MB/sec. Usually this kind of contention doesn't create an issue on G4 class machines. On the other hand, a 16 MB/sec device communicating at 12 MB/sec will take 75% of the time leaving only 25 MB/sec on for the UDMA-100 bus.

Add to that some overhead, and you can see that there can be issues, but in most instances people don't use optical drives constantly, so it hardly matters, and even when they do use the optical drive, slowdown is often not significant.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

I use a Sonnet SATA card. Not cheap, but bootable and reliable.

 

[H3NRY]

G4 towers have 2 ATA busses, a slow ATA buss to which the optical drive and Zip Drive attach, and a fast ATA buss for hard disks. If you need big cheap modern drives, you'll need to add a PCI SATA controller. The PATA to SATA adapters take away the possibility of more than one drive on a buss (no slave SATA drives), so they don't suit a server / box of drives setup very well. Unfortunately, Mac PCI controller cards are expensive. They often cost more than a used G4 computer. It still makes a good server, though. I have a Sawtooth with 2 PATA drives and 2 SATA drives which is my main data repository. The MDD has support for 48-bit LBA, so you don't need to worry about 128GB partitions.

 

[johnklos]

G4 towers have 2 ATA busses, a slow ATA buss to which the optical drive and Zip Drive attach, and a fast ATA buss for hard disks.

The MDD models have three busses - two for up to four drives and one for two optical drives (which can obviously be used for drives, too).

If you need big cheap modern drives, you'll need to add a PCI SATA controller. The PATA to SATA adapters take away the possibility of more than one drive on a buss (no slave SATA drives), so they don't suit a server / box of drives setup very well.

Not true. Every SATA drive to PATA bus adapter that I've seen has master / slave selectability. If you're concerned with putting in lots of drives, of course you'd avoid any that didn't let you select master / slave.

 

[Bunsen]

The MDD models have three busses - two for up to four drives and one for two optical drives (which can obviously be used for drives, too).

Well, that's good to know. Sounds ideal then - set up a smallish boot drive on the "optical" channel, and a 2x750GB RAID on the other two channels. Or 4x750GB if you want RAID 0+1 (RAID10?)

 

[MacJunky]

Mac PCI controller cards are expensive. They often cost more than a used G4 computer.

That is why I tried flashing a PC card. Cards like mine are around $10 USD in USA from what I have heard, mine was $15 CAD in Canada. Downside is not 64bit PCI and no OS 9 support. But it *is* super cheap and bootable.

 

[wood_e]

I suppose I should update this thread.

I finally got around to making my MDD a storage server & DLNA streamer for my PS3.

I found that newegg has kingwin IDE to SATA adapters that had good reviews.

I picked up two adapters, and two 500GB SATA hard drives for under $100.

The hard drives plus adapters won't fit in the original space - period. I probably should've known this but I thought there would at least be an inch... not so much.

So I decided to run the G4 without an optical drive. This setup is working fine - and the adapters make the drive show up as an IDE drive (!) complete with SMART reporting.

Speeds aren't record breaking though. I ran xBench to a tune of 12MB/s. Sucky, but i figure there's loss in translation.

I plan on eventually getting a SATA card and flashing it but since I don't know what works with what then I'll just use this until I get more info.

Video streams fine from the MDD to my PS3 so I'm not too worried about it. The CPUs do jump up in usage when streaming, but it's never choppy.

 

[johnklos]

II found that newegg has kingwin IDE to SATA adapters that had good reviews....

The hard drives plus adapters won't fit in the original space - period. I probably should've known this but I thought there would at least be an inch... not so much.

There are other adapters which fit in the original drive space just fine. I'm using several on a few different G4s.

So I decided to run the G4 without an optical drive. This setup is working fine - and the adapters make the drive show up as an IDE drive (!) complete with SMART reporting.
Speeds aren't record breaking though. I ran xBench to a tune of 12MB/s. Sucky, but i figure there's loss in translation.

There's no discernible loss in translation, as you say. I have SATA drives on IDE busses that average 70 MB/sec. The IDE bus for the optical drives, if I remember correctly, will only do multiword DMA mode 2 which is 16.6 MB/sec. The main IDE bus should be noticeably faster.

 

[wood_e]

Ahh yes I might have it on the wrong bus!

I'll check that out - thanks!