Hi - I recently acquired a Promise Ultra66 IDE card. Thru web searches, I've figured out that there's probably a way to get it to work on my S900, but I can't figure out exactly HOW. Just "sticking it in there" does seem to accomplish much ;) Q1) What do I need to do to get it to work? Are there mac drivers somewhere? Q2) Does the "Promise RAID hack" work on mac at all? Thanks very much! -rik
The conversion is fairly complex. To make the Promise card work on the Mac requires moving some resistors, which is relatively simple. However, one of the resistors is under the flash memory chip (32 pin DIP). So you must be capable of desoldering the 32 pin through hole chip without damaging it. Of course, you could clip the pins and desolder them one at a time, but then you'd need to spend something like $10 on a replacement chip if you could find one at all.
Finally, getting the thing to flash with the Mac firmware is non-trivial and pretty much requires having a legitimate (or converted) VST UltraTek/66 card on hand from which you can use the Flash chip.
To make a long story short, unless you're doing the conversion for the fun, it's not worth the trouble. The converted cards turn up for about $25 every so often. I'll probably have four of them available in the next few weeks, as four Promise cards have fallen into my hands and my PC using friends would laugh if I offered them something as slow as 66 MB/s, because their motherboards have better ATA built in.
Jeff Walther
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