Bruce Johnson wrote:
On Apr 6, 2005, at 4:37 PM, Victoria Brandon wrote:
I've been looking for one of these PCI cards for a while now, so as to add
a second HD to my (Rev 1) B&W. Just found what sounds like a real bargain
in the form of a "Silicon Image Ultra ATA/133 PCI adapter" (details at
http://www.softwareandstuff.com/CRD10155.html). But will it work in a Mac?
If they don't say they work in a mac they don't.
That's a bit of an over-generalization.
ATA adapters are like Video cards; they need Mac-specific firmware on board
to work.
If the card has firmware on it (video cards and disk controllers
typically need firmware to make them usable at boot time), it needs to
have Mac firmware on it to make it usable on a Mac. My beige G3 has a
Radeon 7000 installed that was sold with x86 firmware. I tracked down
Mac firmware and flashed the card with that. There are some IDE
controllers that are flashable to switch them between x86 and Mac, but
AFAIK they're mostly off the market now.
If the card doesn't have firmware on it, there's a fair chance it'll
work as long as a driver exists for the hardware on the card. I bought
a USB 2.0/FireWire/Fast Ethernet combo card recently
(http://www.siig.com/product.asp?pid=249, was ~$45 @ Fry's), and while
the box says nothing about it working on a Mac, everything on it works
just fine with Mac OS X at least (would probably work with 9 as well,
but I've not bothered testing it yet). The card uses a TI FireWire
controller (all FireWire controllers use the same driver), an NEC USB
2.0 controller (all USB 2.0 controllers use the same driver; it was with
USB 1.1 that you had to make sure you didn't get a card with a VIA USB
controller because VIA (and Intel) used UHCI and everybody else used
OHCI), a Realtek 8139 Fast Ethernet controller (which I knew worked
because I had an el-cheapo NIC installed previously that used one of
these), and a PCI-to-PCI bridge (which should just work).
_/_
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