Blue & White G3 SATA Card

Crispy Beef · Apprentice Joined: 29 Apr 2003 Posts: 194 Location: UK

Hi,

I've got my B&W G3 rigged here with Gentoo as a router/firewall for my network, works great. I've recently stuck in a bigger disk and started using it - with Samba - as a file server. This also works great locally and over ssh for remote access. However, now that I've satisfied myself that the system is stable and reliable I want to increase the hard disk capacity. I've done a lot of research on SATA cards and the offerings from Sonnet seem to be pretty good; along with working in the B&W G3. The major downer is trying to find a linux driver or if one exists. I read somewhere that the Sonnet cards are based on a Marvell chipset but I cannot confirm this (I have emailed the manufacturer).

Does anybody have any ideas on how to proceed, I'd love to get a couple of internal SATA drives and mirror them (RAID 1). Here's a link to the Sonnet card that is the top of my list if a linux driver exists:

Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA X4i

I've also read that Acard make the cards for Sonnet, but on checking their site they only offer Mac OS X drivers, and again I cannot find out any chipset info. I've even got to the point of going through the kernel drivers to see what is supported and then trying to match cards to drivers, but not found anything that is useful or in my price range. Any suggestions or alternatives would be much appreciated.
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DirtyHairy · Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 2:27 pm Post subject:

If you plan to use the card only with linux, then you should be able to use nearly any card that the linux kernel supports, not just models branded as compatible with mac...

Crispy Beef · Apprentice Joined: 29 Apr 2003 Posts: 194 Location: UK

Don't the controller cards still need to be compatible with the Mac firmware? But in answer to your question, yes, the machine is only going to run Linux.

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DirtyHairy · Posted: Thu Jan 15, 2009 9:31 pm Post subject:

Anyone correct me if I am wrong, but as long as a device is not dependent on running firmware on the host CPU (like a graphics card or the setup of a hardware raid controller) it should not care about which architecture drives the PCI bus. The only drawback will be that you can't access the device from open firmware, but if your primary disk is not connected to it, this shouldn't be a problem. E.g. I use a off-the-shelf EHCI USB 2.0 controller and a cheap SIL680 based ATA controller (which is flakey though) in my mac without any problems.

EDIT: I threw out the SIL680 today and replaced it with a Promise Fasttrack 100/TX controller which works also fine.

Crispy Beef · Apprentice Joined: 29 Apr 2003 Posts: 194 Location: UK

Just a post to update this thread even though it's a bit old now.

I did get hold of an SATA card from FirmTek that makes use of Intel chips. Worked great in the G3 and had a 2TB RAID10 array going. However it was very, very slow at transferring data (as you'd expect) and would crash when under heavy load. I guess it was all a little too much for it.

The card and RAID array are now happily situated in a G5 PowerMac that I managed to pickup, and the RAID literally flies.

Much better having a PCI-Xcard in a PCI-X bus.

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Crispy