> I've looked at the Sonnet Tempo HD PCI card (part # THD-MW). A > question: What does "Bootability - Not supported" mean? Not (gulp) > what seems the most obvious, that you couldn't boot up from a drive > connected to it, right? That wouldn't be good. Especially after I was > so proud of myself for picking up on the fact that I'd need cables to > go along with the card.
Those ATA cards all model the attached devices as if they were SCSI. In most cases, at least in the cases where the controlling firmware was licensed from Firmkek, the actual originator of ATA add-on cards for Macs, the attached devices are bootable, just as SCSI drives are fully bootable. It could be that Sonnet wrote their own firmware, possibly to save the license fees from Firmtek, and equally possibly they took some shortcuts. Whatever the real reason, the Firmtek-licensed cards are bootable, and so also are the ACARD cards, which use their own firmware, but which is architecturally compatible with Firmtek's. Indeed, Firmtek made some boo-boos in its SCSI implementation, which ACARD duplicated in order to be compatible. You can initialize a drive on an ACARD card and subsequently transport it to a Firmtek-licensed card and it will be plug-and-play. Needless to say, I don't buy Sonnet's products because they tend to cut corners and produce products with incompatibilities or other obvious limitations. -- 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
