[geeks] SATA on G4 Power Mac, revisited

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 6 May 2007, Joshua Boyd wrote:

>> [0] http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/SATAPCI2P/
>
> That card and the one mentioned by Phil Brutsche are both regular PCI
> cards.  Exactly how good is the performance with them on a system with
> other peripherals?

I don't have any hard benchmarks, but it's an astounding difference in
performance from the stock IDE in my Quicksilver 2002.

> I'm wondering if it is worth spending double/tripple the money to get
> a PCI-X card for a DA/QS G4 for the sake of supporting 64bit PCI?  Of
> course, the cash increase also gets you more ports.

I think you'd be better served by getting a 32-bit PCI card, and putting
the difference aside into a G5 or MacPro savings fund.  Unless you're
trying to do full-frame video captures in real time, you're not going to
notice the difference.

> I guess a related question is can cards be 64bit on a card by card
> basis, or does one 32bit card cause the entire system to fall back to
> 32bits?

I don't have any documentation handy, but I seem to recall that bus
width is negotated per slot.  I'm not sure whether bus speed is, as
well.

> Mainly I'm concerned about if having a regular PCI card is asking for
> the card to end up being a bottleneck in heavy IO circumstances.

I beat the hell out of my Quicksilver, and it performs admirably for a
5-year old computer, especially considering how much software has
bloated in those 5 years.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke ) "If we keep our pride, though paradise is lost, we
Elgin, TX        (   will pay the price, but we cannot count the cost."
USA               )                             --Neil Peart, "Bravado"