The Sonnet/Acard ATA 66 does work in the lower slots. Paul C
Jeff Walther wrote:
At 10:17 -0700 08/13/2005, Tony Michaels wrote:
Really?
I had my Tempo ( Sonnet USB 1.0/ Firewire ) in the thrid slot.
Typically, it's ATA and video cards which would only work in the top two.
-Antonio
It's actually considerably more complicated than that. If you had
your Tempo working in the third slot, I suspect that either slots 4 -
6 were empty, or that you were only using either the USB or the
Firewire portion of the Tempo card. If neither of these were the
case you could help the list out by letting us know which additional
cards you had in the lower slots.
The firmware (ROMs) in the S900 (and presumably the entire Apple x500
series, since they're the same ROMs) do not work properly when PCI-PCI
Bridges (PPBs) are daisy chained.
Because the S900 already has a PPB on the motherboard, this situation
occurs pretty frequently for us. Some PCI cards have PPBs on board.
These are the multi-function PCI cards such as USB/FW, dual SCSI, dual
video cards. When you put one of these cards in a lower slot in the
S900, you've formed a daisy chain of PPBs--the one on the motherboard,
serving the lower slots, and the one on the PCI card.
However, the exception is that if there are no other cards in the
lower PCI slots, then this daisy chaining can work. Also, if there
are other cards in the lower slots but they lack on-board firmware
(ethernet, USB, FW, e.g.) then that configuration may work as well.
I've also found that either the Twin Turbo or the Adaptec 2940UW
(can't remember which any more) may be tolerated in a lower slot as
long as it is lower or higher (again, can't remember which) than the
PPB bearing card. I'm pretty sure it was the Twin Turbo that was
tolerant this way.
Some cards don't have a distinct PPB chip on board, but they act like
they have a PPB on board and so create this incompatibility. These
include a great many of the ATI video cards (dual video or other
multi-fuction) and the Atto UL2D (dual SCSI on a single chip, but that
chip must have an internal PPB).
Cards such as the Formac Proformance III video card (single video)
work just fine in the a lower slot. The Twin Turbo is fine in the
lower slots, but IMS revised the drivers several times to make it
work. The Ult. Rez. card does not work properly in the lower slots if
the driver that provides acceleration is enabled. Specifically, if
you try to change resolution or colors the machine will freeze, if the
Ult. Rez. is in a lower slot. I guess IMS went out of business before
they could revise the drivers enough. Of course the work around is,
disable the Ult. Rez. driver in Ext. Man., reboot, change the
resolution, etc., reenable the driver in Ext. Man. and reboot again.
What a pain. :-(
Oddly, the Adaptec/Apple 2940U2B doesn't work in the lower slots even
though it is a single SCSI bus card. At least I had trouble with it
there, though it seemed to work at first.
Another oddball is the VST UltraTek/66 card which does not have a PPB
but demonstrates the same type of incompability as cards which do have
a PPB. However, a look at the device tree of a machine with a VST
installed yields a clue. Apparently the VST firmware makes the
UltraTek/66 look as if it is two devices, hence similar to a PPB and
that is probably what triggers the firmware bug.
As far as ATA cards go, the Acard ATA cards work just fine in lower
slots. I have a 6280M working in a lower slot right now and have for
months. The Sonnet ATA cards generally don't work in the lower slots.
I believe, but am not certain, that the distinction is that cards with
firmware written by FirmTek have trouble in the lower slots and others
don't. FirmTek writes the firmware for the Sonnet cards and wrote the
firmware for the VST card. Apparently they use a programming choice
that triggers this bug.
I'm not sure about the Acard ATA-66 card. I have a vague memory that
either it didn't work in the lower slots because on that one card
Acard got the firmware from FirmTek, or that it does work in the lower
slots and the Sonnet card based on it does as well. But I can't
remember which. Sigh.
Also, I think that Sonnet and/or SIIG uses the Acard 6880M for their
RAID ATA card and so that particular Sonnet and/or SIIG card will work
in the lower slots, even though their other cards do not.
BTW, the Acard 6280M is down to $60 at Newegg with $5 shipping.
Jeff Walther
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