• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

PowerTower Pro: ATA CF Slowness

LaPorta

Well-known member
Hi everyone,

My PTPro was wonky with the SCSI2SD v6 in it, so a few months I took it out and got a CF adapter to use with the Tempo ATA card that I have in there. I believe it is an ATA/100 model if I recall off my head. The CF card works pretty well, but I have issues every now and again. For instance, I have multiple partitions, and depending on which System version I am using, startup to the desktop can take a real long time. 7.5 works pretty well, but both 8 and 9 start to take a real long time after extensions have loaded to get to the desktop...a few minutes it seems (I haven't timed it, though). Shutdown does the same thing, much longer than you would expect with a normal hard drive. Other things happen too: when playing Panzer General (if anyone is familiar with the game), there are combat animations, and they stutter and take a while to load at times, which I never experienced before with this setup. Other times, things like opening folders work just fine.

I haven't the faintest idea what the issue is with this, but I wasn't sure if upgrading to an ATA/133 card would help or make no difference at all. Any suggestions are appreciated.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
What kind of CF card are you using? CF as a tech lasted a very long time, and older or lower end CF cards might actually be quite slow.

And, almost certainly same as with SD cards, you want to get the best possible CF card, so as to accommodate for their not generally being designed for computer usage, so, I'd say to get a new CF card before you get a new card for your Mac.

If you do get a new card for your Mac, consider one of the SIL3112 SATA cards instead, then you can just get a normal SATA SSD that is meant for general purpose computer usage. (new ones will be meant to stand up to modern general purpose computers, even.)

 

jessenator

Well-known member
This will work in the old-school PCI slots? No software needed?
Assuming you mean the SIL3112 SATA card, it will need a new ROM flashed (there are one or two people here who can do that), but I've had one working in a PCI machine as old as a PowerWave with no issues at all.

FWIW, in these non-ATA Macs/clones, the SATA cards are a much more convenient way to go, all around. It's still easy to get decent Samsung, et al SATA drives at affordable costs, since, at least for me, I'm not looking to get above 64 GB anyway. I've even managed to get a few SATA optical drives working on them as well.

In my ATA Macs, I have a CF adapter, however. I'm using SanDisk Extreme 120 MB/s UDMA 7 which, really, is a bit overkill, but It's incredibly fast , and because I had CF cards sitting around... On my 4400/StarMax setups, running both 7.6.1 and 9.1 I had zero issues, really, and menu shutdown was almost instantaneous. This is my adapter:
GgxqZZ8l.jpg.f8c688fdfedbed4e9ba2d0b227fb2335.jpg


Of course, that's with an on-board ATA bus. I've never used an ATA PCI card.

 
Last edited by a moderator:

LaPorta

Well-known member
Here is my card. I assume it is fine for this use, but let me know if I’m wrong. If anyone has a specific SATA card they can link me to on amazon or something, I’d take a look at it. What is involved in flashing it, and what is put in place of the standard driver?

39F818C2-2A7B-47DE-B224-2CD83E6771DC.jpeg

 

jessenator

Well-known member
The card looks to be the same spec as the one I've got (UDMA 7). My money would be on the IDE interface and also 8 & 9 quirks.

As far as the SATA interface, anything with the SIL3112 chipset is large enough to accommodate the Mac-friendly ROM. AFAIK/have been told, no other chipset is big enough to be flashed with it. Here's an ebay listing for a card similar to the one I got from defor: https://www.ebay.com/itm/233388086306

As far as flashing the SIL3112 cards, this guide here is about what I've seen described by forum members who've done it: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-to-flashing-pc-sil3112-sata-cards-for-mac.1690231/

System Profiler will just see it as another "SCSI" bus, even though it isn't.

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
The IDE card I have now is seen by my machine as SCSI, so it must be a similar deal. I'll verify which card it is tonight. Maybe just the faster ATA card would do it, but this is out of my realm of usual expertise.

P.S. - I can already see from the guide that I can't do the flashing myself...I don't own a PC!

 
Last edited by a moderator:

Daniël

Well-known member
The card looks to be the same spec as the one I've got (UDMA 7). My money would be on the IDE interface and also 8 & 9 quirks.

As far as the SATA interface, anything with the SIL3112 chipset is large enough to accommodate the Mac-friendly ROM. AFAIK/have been told, no other chipset is big enough to be flashed with it. Here's an ebay listing for a card similar to the one I got from defor: https://www.ebay.com/itm/233388086306

As far as flashing the SIL3112 cards, this guide here is about what I've seen described by forum members who've done it: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/guide-to-flashing-pc-sil3112-sata-cards-for-mac.1690231/

System Profiler will just see it as another "SCSI" bus, even though it isn't.
Most noname SiI3112 cards cannot be flashed with the full ROM as is. It isn't the chipset that holds the ROM, it's a dedicated ROM chip. And on most of these cards, this is a 1 Megabit chip. The problem is that the Wiebetech ROM floating around that does fit on these, only is meant for OS X. Classic Mac OS/System Software will not work with this firmware. The full SeriTek Firmtek firmware requires a 4 Megabit ROM chip, and even has checks that will ensure it only works on AM29LV040, MX29LV040, or PM39LV040 ROM chips. Any other 4 Megabit chip will fail the check, and the card will not work. 

Another consideration, is that these LV chips are "low voltage", meaning they run at 3.3V instead of 5V. The card must run the ROM chip at 3.3V, or the replacement LV040 will die. Some will have jumpers, some will have resistors or solder pads, and with some it's just whatever it came with. All in all, it's best to just buy one of the preflashed SiI3112 cards that are occasionally available on eBay if you're not comfortable desoldering and soldering PLCC ROM chips.

 
Last edited by a moderator:

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Maybe just the faster ATA card would do it




Have you done any disk benchmarking on it?

It would be interesting to see what that looks like, because it's not unlikely that you aren't maxing out what your ATA card can do, unless it's like a really old ATA card, and that the limitation really is with that CF card.

Although, all manner of things can also cause random slowdowns. My 6200 boots fast and then just hangs upon the launch of finder. I think that it's just Speed Doubler 8 taking forever to do something, but I haven't tried turning it off to confirm that for real.

I don't know why a cloned install would do this though, so it's hard to say if that part of it is a disk issue or a weird mac os issue.

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Cory, which program would you recommend to try and elucidate what the issue may be via benchmarking?

 

jessenator

Well-known member
I'd be interested to see what you get in MacBench 4.0's disk tests (and the system overall ;) ) My native IDE/ATA-CF tests have a massive boost over the spinners so I'd like to see what you get on a PCI interface of the era. Also, a tangent of note, just in case your SATA dreams are realized, disks connected to my SIL3112 card do not like being benchmarked by MacBench 4.0 at least. It crashes almost every time during the first segment of the test suite. Haven't tried with other tools though, so it may be just MB.

I know some others use FWB Hardisk Toolkit's benchmark for other uses on the forum (there was a SCSI/FastSCSI/Ultra/etc thread a while back), and there's also Norton SpeedDisk/SysInfo, I suppose.

I would think that since there's all the MB4 test results up on vTools, it's the de facto if not the de jure benchmark for everything ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Possibly because v4.0 at least works on such a wide swath of hardware.

 
Last edited by a moderator:

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
heck yeah, macbench it!

A DC6 image of macbnech 4 is up on vtools in the public folder, run it (you might want to turn on detailed disk testing) and let us know what you get!

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I haven’t gotten around to it yet, but I downloaded version 4 last night. I’m at

work until Sunday morning, so I’ll get to it then.

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
So unfortunately, version 4 doesn't play nicely with my PT Pro. It won't record any disk speed results, can't name the processor or anything (it has a G3 card). I may try version 5.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
You have to tell it to run all tests. Next to the button at the top that you use to start the test there should be a drop-down and you can change to all tests.

If your display isn't 1152x870 or higher it'll skip the high-res publishing graphics test.

And, if you don't have the cdrom mounted, it'll skip the cdrom performance test.

(Unless you did all that and it still didn't show the results.)

v5 might be on there too but it'll do the same thing, worth trying though because it'll have a better idea of what anything beyond a g3/300 is and it might even know about and test for altivec specifically.

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
Yeah, I did have all tests selected. I'm thinking of just burning the disc and doing that, and also using v5 (which appears to be on Macintosh Garden). More on that this evening when I get home.

Also, at least looking at the disk status indicator in the menu bar from Norton, it appears the slowdown is when the write icon is shown, taking long times to write. That may be what the issue is, but, again, tests will show more.

 
Last edited by a moderator:

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
ooooh, neat idea.

With regard to the activity lights: That would, roughly, track with the problem we see with the scsi2sd and potential other SD based solutions. Basically, consumer flash media meant for cameras and stuff is actually quite slow and as a rule in the CF era cameras relied on large internal buffers to keep shooting going while the camera wrote to the card.

The next couple things I'd try, in general, would be: to get a regular IDE disk that's known good and set that up and see if it's any better, and then, see about trying an IDE/SATA adapter or make the decision about if you want to get a conventional ide disk, a newer CF card, or a SATA card or do something fun like uscsi.

There's a lot of physical room and flexibility inside a PTP For stuff like wiring so this is sort of a sky's the limit scenario. I think the only disk you probably can't reasonably run is a seagate elite. (which, you probably wouldn't want to boot from anyway.)

 

LaPorta

Well-known member
I had a regular ATA disk in there previously (before it started to die), and it didn't really show this sort of thing.

 
Top