Stardate 060211.11:19 -0600. A subspace message from B.L. reads:
the drive controller in G3 PowerBooks is incompatible with ATA-6 hard
drives. When replacing the internal hard drive, you should be sure to
obtain an ATA-5 compliant drive,
**************************
I've seen this warning posted before and wondered how one would be able
to tell whether or not a drive was Ata5, Ata6 or what have you.
You think that the LEM specs-pages would at least use the more
popular interpretations :)
ATA-5 means that the drive supports (and prefers) Ultra-DMA/66 mode
(meaning it can support data transfer rates up to 66 Mbps (megabits
per second), whereas ATA-6 drives supports (and defaults to)
Ultra-DMA/100 mode (100 Mbps).
In our older PowerBooks that don't like ATA-6, the IDE/ATA controller
chips aren't all that clever, and don't know anything about
Ultra-DMA/100. When such an equipped Mac encounters a UDMA-100 drive
as part of it's "let's get going and see where everything is" routine
at power-on or restart, the onboard chip sends out a query and
listens for any IDE device's response-code. An ATA-6 hard drive sees
the query and goes "Hi! I talk Ultra-DMA/100, you look friendly!"
Alas, the PowerBook's IDE chip goes "Huh? I don't understand what
you're saying, I'll just ignore you for now, I'm busy."
On a typical PC, users and the OS have some level of control over
just *how* the IDE interface(s) communicate with their drives -- they
can tell a fast IDE controller to speak s-l-o-w-l-y with
less-compliant drives. We Mac people have no such smarts available,
and have to live with whatever defaults the chips are set up for.
Hope this explains things :)
Geoffrey
--
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