Jeff,
My PTP now has an IDE drive, thanks to an "ACARD ATA-100+" PCI controller card
and a Maxtor ATA-133 80GB drive. I have OS X and it's Classic environment as
partitions on the Maxtor and it boots more reliably than did my original SCSI
disk with the same partitions. XpOStfacto makes booting OS X simple! I'm up to
10.1.3 without any issues.
The ACARD acts as a SCSI controller to the motherboard supporting up to 4 IDE
drives on two independant busses. OS X 10.1.1 and later contains everything
needed -- no extra software to install. If you're still running OS X 10.1[flat]
there is a replacement "driver" that supports >137GB drives. The card is also
fully supported on OS 9 without anything additional. The on-card firmware
supports all the ATA standards up to and including the one that supports
133MB/sec transfers and very large drives. With my PTP's original 604e
processor I can't get transfers to come even close to that of course.
There is a SIIG-branded controller (CompUSA #SC-MP4A12 I believe, and also
available from Other World Computing) and one from Miglia that are both
actually the same ACARD controller.
> Got a question for thest:
>
> First off, is it possible for a PowerTower to boot off an IDE drive
> connected to a PCI expansion controller card?
>
> Second, does anyone have experience doing this, and what controller do you
> recommend?
It initially was a bear to get this to work -- I got data corruption every time
I turned around. I then swapped the L2 cache between two identical PTP systems
and I've been working fine since.
Marty
Technology Consultant
Info Avenue IS Department
Compaq OpenVMS Technical Advisory Forum member
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