On Oct 1, 2008, at 9:14 PM, Mullin9 wrote:
>> The best Firewire cards use the Texas Instruments chipset. Others may >> also work, I'm not aware of any that are unbootable. On the other >> end, >> the enclosure end, Oxford chipsets are by far the best, and some need >> to be avoided, specifically the GeneSys Logic GL711/811 and the early >> Prolific Logic PL3507. These are flakey and can't boot. Most of the >> enclosures sold by HD manufacturers are bootable and OK. The Oxford 911 is flawed. Some support certain specific large drives but not other large drives. Support for large drives was obtained by a flawed hack to the firmware of an otherwise unmodified Oxford 911 chip set. The later 911+ is fully compatible with large drives in every respect, without the need for hacks. Oxford also offers later chips, too. By now, nearly every FW case in new production should be capable of large drive support without restriction, although some documents may state 500 GB as a limit. In this specific instance, that apparent limitation is because the case was tested with 500 GB drives, by not with larger drives which have since come into the market. As the method for properly supporting drives larger than 131,072 MB is the same regardless of the capacity (160, 200, 250, 300, 320, 400, 500, 640, 1000 and 1500 GB) a limitation expressed as, say, 500 GB, is not significant, and drives larger than 500 GB will work, too. The large drives all know about the LBA48 property (splitting the request across two command data buffers), and the updated and new FW chips do to. The TI chip sets which are included in many desktop and laptop motherboards appear to be very well-behaved, and most of these are directly supported by MacOS X. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed Low End Mac's G3-5 List, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list?hl=en Low End Mac RSS feed at feed://lowendmac.com/feed.xml -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
