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Mac Hammer Fan · Mar 27, 2006, 08:30 AM

I know that this B&W G3 Revision 1 question has a bad onboard ATA controller and that it caused disk damage on large disks under OS9. But OSX is a different system. Does the disk damage also occur under Panther and Tiger?
And does the disk damage also occur on disks of 20 GB?

TIA

bowwowman · Mar 27, 2006, 09:52 AM

Yes the corruption will occur under OS X too. But the main issue was with using 2 HD's connected to the mobo controller, not the size of the HD per se. Most of those machines with only 1 HD did not normally have any problems.

There was NO (on-board) support for large (128GB+) HD's in any mac of that era, except by adding a PCI controller card....

Mac Hammer Fan · Mar 27, 2006, 11:09 AM

I have read at some Forums or xlr8yourmac that large disks can be damaged by the onboard ATA of a G3 B&W Revision 1, even if they are set as master.
Even if there is only one disk connected.

bowwowman · Mar 27, 2006, 04:10 PM

Yes that is a possibility, and unfortunately it is a hit or miss situation. THere is really no way to tell in advance if it will happen or not.

Best advice is to run the machine for a while, but without any critical data on the HD, and of course.....BACK UP! BACK UP! BACK UP! to another HD or optical disks just in case

Mac Hammer Fan · Mar 27, 2006, 04:19 PM

I guess the safest option is to use a PCI ATA controller... (e.g. Sonnet Tempo)

bowwowman · Mar 27, 2006, 08:13 PM

Yep, I used a Tempo/100 in my B&W for over 4 years notta problemo......

even though it was a rev 2, I just wanted the faster throughput & larger size HD's

tooki · Mar 28, 2006, 02:32 PM

Yeah, when used with most (all?) modern hard disks, the Rev 1's ATA controller will cause corruption, regardless of whether there's one drive or two. It's a pure hardware issue, so it doesn't matter whatever OS you are using.

I concur, use an ATA card.

tooki

mountainash · Mar 29, 2006, 02:23 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

<Snip!>

I concur, use an ATA card.

tooki

Or a S-ATA card, which are cheaper and a little more future proof. Ofcourse then you'd have to get a S-ATA drive. But prices are under 0.5USD per Gig, so you could get a 300Gb drive

But for the price of an ATA or S-ATA card you could probably trade up to a later B&W or even a G4.

Mac Hammer Fan · Mar 29, 2006, 11:41 AM

Is a serial ATA faster than ATA on legacy Macs?
And OS9 compatible?
I was considering buying one of those cards (SIIG?) but I wasn't sure it would be compatible with OS9 and especially with a Powerrlogix 1GHz ZIF...

mountainash · Apr 2, 2006, 01:05 PM

Originally Posted by Mac Hammer Fan

Is a serial ATA faster than ATA on legacy Macs?
And OS9 compatible?
I was considering buying one of those cards (SIIG?) but I wasn't sure it would be compatible with OS9 and especially with a Powerrlogix 1GHz ZIF...

AFAIK, the limiting factor will be the speed of the hard drive, so SATA will be a little faster. I imagine that the speed difference will increase over time.

I think that the entry boards from firmtek, acard and sonnet are all OS9 compatible, and at least one (the firmtek) is meant to work with OS8 and in beige machines (PCI Power Macs ie 7200-9600), aswell.

I've used both the Firmtek SeriTek/1S2 and the ACARD AEC-6290M, both in G3s and G4s. But I think that always with Panther or Tiger. But set up was a breeze and they both boot up okay and seem faster than the onboard ATA.