Sonnet SATA card in G4

Today I installed a sonnet SATA PCI card in a G4 powermac. Then I installed a samsung SATA card. The sonnet card is known to be bootable so I though this had a real good chance of working.

The card was acting wonky. Turns out its a known issue where G4s need the card's firmware reverted. I did that and it got a little better but not perfect.

In the end, I was able to get the card to work great with a 2.5" SATA HDD I had. But I could not get it to work with the samsung SSD.

I'm wondering if this is a known issue. It reminded me of issue I had using SATA3 drives on SATA1 Macs. They're supposed to be backwards compatible but they're just not sometimes. Anyone else ever done anything like this? I feel like these might be previously known quirks/incompatibilities that were just forgotten to time.

I can't answer your exact question.
A lot of these SATA cards came out after Mac OS 9 had officially ended. It would not surprise me that Mac OS 9 support was nice to have but not essential.

I do have an old point to raise with regard to cards in general.
A lot of these cards are getting on in years and will need caps replaced or other care.
If you have a card that doesn't work, take a good look at the hardware first. It may well need new caps.

This Mac is running Panther, not OS 9. And the card kind of worked. After the down-flash, the card worked with a hard drive. But the SSD wouldn't work. In the end, the customer has happy with the hard drive as long as it worked. But I wonder what would happen if we bought a bunch more, different brands of SSD, would we get one that worked perfectly. Maybeeeeeee, maybe not.

Yes, another SSD brand might do the trick, search forums for brands and models that might be compatible.

In my G4s, some of the newer SATA III SSDs have shown compatibility issues with SATA I mode on SIL based SATA I cards — even though, SATA should be backwards compatible, it depends on the actual drive. I need to check the exact type of drives that run in my G4s and G3s

I had this same problem with my Xserve. SATA3 drives just won't work. Or SATA 2 either. SATA 3 desktop drives usually let you jumper down to SATA 2 but not 1. SATA 2 lets you jumper down to SATA 1, so i had to buy some old stock WD drives to run in htere. My next server sadly won't be a Mac but it also don't have these crazy problems to deal with.

AFAIK and confirmed - that Sonnet SATA card is Mac OS 7.5.5 bootable off SATA SSD - blazing fast!
Cheers
AP

HAH thats so funny. I wish the customer wanted to keep trying to get it to work, because I really wanted to see this old G4 boot in 9 seconds.

As for me, in my own retro Mac, I have a 7300 with a PCI IDE sonnet card, and a 2.5" SATA hard drive connected to a single drive SATA to IDE adapter.

Maybe next time I find myself with a space SSD laying around, I'll think about installing it in that old relic.

The funny thing is though, the current HDD setup is so much faster than the original 5 MB/s SCSI internal drive, that it still feels PRACTICALLY like its an SSD.