Sonnet Tempo SATA PCI card

[Unknown_K]

Somebody was selling a defective Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA card on Ebay with box and cables but no software CD. I paid $7 shipped for it and stuck it in one of my QS machines. The card works fine (has the Seritek firmware installed from the last owner) under OSX 10.4.11 and OS 9.2.2, haven't tested if it is bootable.

Not too bad of a deal. Is this card one of those where you have to format the HD on the card or it is unusable? The system seen the 80 GB HD before I initialized it (it had a NTFS partition OSX could not use).

 

[dougg3]

It should work fine without any special formatting needed on the drive. I've directly read a LInux partition on a SATA drive through that same card with MacFUSE and fuse-ext2.

 

[LCGuy]

If it works, for $7 it was worth every cent. I bought mine new and I love it. Truly a great card for any PCI PowerMac (while Sonnet says G3 onwards, I've heard reports of it working in pre-G3 PCI PowerMacs)

For the record, they don't come with a CD. Well, mine didn't anyway. I put it in my G3 and it saw the card right away (recognised it as a SCSI card), and I was able to connect and use drives straight out of the box. And you should be able to format HDDs with any drive utility - Drive Setup works fine.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

IIRC, the Mac always identifies drive types as SCSI. As I understand it the implementation of IDE made use of the SCSI toolbox routines. SATA implementation undoubtedly built upon those toolbox tweaks.

NICE nab, BTW! :approve:

 

[bibilit]

I collected one as well :

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=21939

Not the SATA one (the previous ATA), but working great.

Congrats.

 

[CelGen]

As I understand it the implementation of IDE made use of the SCSI toolbox routines. SATA implementation undoubtedly built upon those toolbox tweaks

SCSI shares genes with SAS, which shares genes with SATA.

 

[techfury90]

It's neither. The Sonnet cards (both PATA and SATA) have a driver in their ROM that presents itself as a SCSI card for maximum compatibility with older Mac OS versions. (They work as far back as 7.5.2)