CF card in my 9600

[waynestewart]

I’ve been mostly using a 9600 running 9.2.2 for a few older games. Quite often when it came to a save or a reload, I’d have an annoying wait while the drive spun up.

I had a generic ATA to CF adapter kicking around so I thought I’d see about using it. I tried connecting it as a second drive on the PC133 card but the system would freeze during bootup. Didn’t have any luck adding it to any of the SCSI to ATA adapters I have. Either it'd freeze or wouldn't be recognized. I had some PC100 cards so I put the adapter on it’s own card and it worked like a charm. Copied the whole boot drive over to it. It was a little faster booting than the 80gb on the pc133 card but not hugely. Still, no extra noise and no spin up time.

 

[beachycove]

Very interesting. Did you have to do anything special to format it?

 

[waynestewart]

No, just used the Apple utilities

 

[beachycove]

Was if formatted as a scsi drive, as required by some of the pci cards?

 

[waynestewart]

Drives on my PC100 cards show up as SCSI. At least in OS 9 and earlier. I don't think I've tried one with OSX

 

[Byrd]

Would you mind posting a link of the generic PCI CF card that you used? Thanks.

A silent, cheap and fast-ish solid state drive would be handy in many Macs with a spare PCI slot.

 

[waynestewart]

I bought it last fall locally. The card doesn't have a name on it but this is the card and the place I bought it from.

http://ncix.com/products/?sku=33463&vpn=SD-CF-IDE-A&manufacture=Syba

There's a place for a 44 pin connector but it's not present

 

[MacJunky]

I have two of that model, they work for my desktop uses and have never caused issues. Got one in my 286 at the moment.

BTW, what ATA100 and ATA133 PCI cards are you using?

 

[waynestewart]

They're both Sonnet cards.

A while back I used to get a lot of free Macs from a local shop. Actually truckloads. These cards and a lot of others were in those machines. Unfortunately I pretty much lost touch with the shop. These miserable little kids decided that they needed most of my spare time. I wasn't smart enough to run away, now I'm trapped.

 

[waynestewart]

Tried the CF adapter on the Sonnet ATA 133 card and couldn’t get the 9600 to boot. So I decided to remove the ATA 133 card and try the ATA 100 card with CF in slot one. It did boot slightly faster there. Since I have boot times, with the same 9.2.2 system copied over to all the drives.

18gb on the built-in SCSI boots in 115 sec

80gb on Sonnet ATA 133 in slot 1 boots in 94 sec

4gb CF on Sonnet ATA 100 in slot 1 boots in 83 sec

Currently has 400mhz G3 with maxed out RAM