Hi Andreas, > With the adapters/converters, to connect a SATA drive to a IDE/ATA (PATA) > controller, booting from it is not the question. It will work, because the > SATA drive is seen as a regular IDE/ATA drive by the hardware. > > With a SATA PCI card, that provides the system with a number of (additional) > SATA ports - so you can connect (additional) SATA drives to your computer - > the problem might be that using such connected drives with an operting system > might be possible, but booting from it might not be possible. > > E.g. > You need to boot from a (native supported) IDE drive, the driver (kext in the > case of Mac OS X) for accessing the additional SATA drives through the SATA > PCI expansion card are then loaded, and only then accessing these additional > drives is possible. > > This *could* be the case for standard PC SATA cards -- they *might* be > supported by Mac OS X, provided the SATA chip used is supported. Advantage: > standard SATA PCI expansion cards for PCs are generally cheaper than those for > Macs. But since a PC version doesn't include any Open Firmware stuff, booting > from connected drives *cannot* be possible. > > But, I guess that most SATA PCI cards support boot, otherwise it doesn't make > much sense for Macs anyway.
I know most of what you explained, thank you. I wanted to get a SATA PCI-controller myself at first but soon found out that the ones supporting booting OSX were very expensive, I was just looking for big cheap drives as I have a big (and growing) movie collection. So therefore the controller card was out of the question. Also all my PCI-slots are full, I could pull a usb-controller but anyway ... The adapters are small and dirt cheap and they work. There is one jumper on them which has to be closed when the drive is in "slave" mode, otherwise it's plug and play. The speed advantage with SATA is only marginal with a plain vanilla PCI-controller in an 1.25Ghz MDD, also the drives are still too slow themselves IMHO. So I guess my advice is still the best if you just need more capacity with no boot problems for little money. If anybody needs an external disk, in case of Firewire or USB enclosures he should check if the drive with the adapter still fits inside the case and - very important - if the controller in the external case supports big disks. Most of them don't. Only then should one get an external SATA drive and would need a PCI- controller with an eSATA connector. Just my 2 ¢ ... Kind regards, Jörg. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, 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 g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
