Can a Pioneer 110 work on a Mac's ATA-66 bus?

[willrob]

Santa brought me an ATA-PCI controller card. He apparently thought that four drive bays and two optical bays wasn't enough to cram into my G4. I thanked him, but decided instead to use the ATA-133/100/66 capabilities of the card to speed up my DVD 110D's reading/writing speed.

I theorized that I could attach my two striped RAID drives to the card, removing them from the limitations of the ATA-66 bus they were on and thus kick up their speed. Then I would plug the normally ATA-33 crippled optical drive into the now available ATA-66, and finally get those 16X writing/ripping speeds the other kids are getting.

Then reality kicked in. For those of you familiar with the innards of a dual G4, the drive bays are neatly secured out of the way, with a minimal amount of cable needed to plug them into their buses on the mother board. What needed to be done, to achieve my goal, was to plug them into the PCI card, which comes with one UtraDMA 40 pin 80 wire cable. While it can connect two drives, it unfortunately can't possibly reach both of the drives. I was forced to use two cables, and both of the cards ports—but even then the cables barely reached. I then needed a third cable to plug the optical drive into the ATA 66 port.

With three of these awkwardly stiff cables in my G4, the box would not close properly. After much careful bending and folding of the cables, to prevent them from snagging on the heat sink, I got the box closed and ran an XBench test to see if the RAID was indeed faster, I forgot to mention that I carefully backed up everything on the RAID, assuming that it wouldn't survive the transfer; but the RAID was intact and everything was as I left it.

The XBench test showed a boost from a score of 45 to one of 62. I was happy until I went to check the optical drive and discovered that it was not seen by System Profiler at all. For some reason plugging it into the ATA-66 bus didn't work. So I unplugged the RAID and put the 110D on the PCI card.

Now it was seen and ripped and burned at 16X! But I wanted the best of both worlds. I could keep the RAID on the card if I could get the ATA-66 bus to work with the DVD writer. ATA-66 is all it requires for 16X writing.

So why doesn't it work when plugged into that bus? The card has two ports, each of which can mount two drives. Unfortunately the standard cables can't connect two drives to one port (at least not inside my G4). Are their longer versions of these cables available? If so, then I could plug the RAID and the DVD into the card.

[willrob]

Despite most web servers being down or the Holiday, I did discover that there are longer cables out there: the standard is only 18 inches and barely reaches inside my box. But there are 24 inch and 36 inch ultra DMA cables, and some are not ribbons at all, but are round cables. CompUSA has them, $9-$12 each; so I may have to drive out there.

[willrob]

Answering my original quation (title of thread):

Yes, it can. It turns out the cable I was using wasn't working. I bought a new (rond rather than flat) cable and now the 110D is connected to the ATA-66 port and attains 16x writing speeds (such aas they are: i.e.= it will max out at 16 x toward the end of the burn; but the straight uphill climb the burner makes starting at 8X is the kind of path it was meant to take).

The burner also worked on the ATA-133 PCI card, but since it tops out at ATA-66 speeds, there was no reason to attach it there. I reserved the card for my RAID (which is also connected with a round Mad Dog cable (36 inch, although 24 inch would have worked also).

[willrob]

I'm updating my experience.

Yes, the 110D can work on the ATA-66 bus.
It can also work on an ATA PCI card.

What doesn't work is a RAID on a PCI card, at least not one made with Apple's Disk Utility. My RAID failed, and after much aggravation and fiddling with jumpers and cables, I've come to the conclusion that the only solution is either a true PCI RAID card (hardware RAID) or a 3rd party software solution, like SoftRaid (which I used on my SCSI drives of yore).

With a RAID made on the ATA-66 bus in my G4, the jumpers need to be set as Cable select. The SIIG card requires a Master/Slave set up and Disk Utility simply fails at both creating a RAID or simply initializing the drives. I can plug the two drives into separate ports on the card, but Disk Utility can't make a RAID of them in that configuration.

So I'm putting the Pioneer DVD-R on the PCI card (rationalizing my $50 expense by achieving 3 minute DVD burns on 16X media) and keeping my RAID on the ATA-66 bus (rationalizing the loss of speed by remembering that digital video over firewire no longer requires high speed drives).

And all the crawling around on the floor switching jumpers and cables I rationalize as a way to burn off all those Christmas Cookies.

[Ladd]

I have a dual 1.25 GHz G4 MDD -- what ATA-PCI card did you get?

No bad experiences such as disruption of deep sleep, I hope ...

[willrob]

The card I got was the SIIG Ultra ATA 133/100 Pro. I belive that Acard makes the unit.

The optical drive works fine on it, and there are no deep sleep issues.

I simply want to make a faster RAID on the card and it can't handle it. I can create the RAID with Disk Utility, but it fails pretty quickly thereafter. I need to get a dedicated RAID card (at twice the cost) or get upgrade my OS9 version of SoftRaid. Under OS9 I had a SCSI RAID on a PCI ATA-100 card and it was very reliable, using SoftRaid to create it.

It was next to impossible to find any first hand info on the net regarding such a set up. Various forums had a lot of info on RAID cards, but not on optical drives on PCI cards, nor RAIDS on non RAID cards.

[TugBoat]

Yea, topics such as these can get complicated. I'm debating the same issues for a FW800 Dual G4. Really need more space, and faster speeds never hurt. Right now I'm leaning towards a simple two channel SATA card from FirmTek. Add two SATA 250GB Seagate drives, keep my two WD ATA 120's on separate channels, and that should be enough. I would change from the RAID 0 I'm now using with the WD's to a RAID 0 on the FirmTek card. And all four drives would be on separate channels. I might even consider putting my NEC 3550 on the ATA 66 bus, but, I'm not really interested in saving the 3-4 minutes I might gain. I usually burn at half the rated speeds anyway... something about speed kills when using some optical media 8)
Some links,
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Firmtek/FTST1S2/
http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/FT1002.php
http://www.macgurus.com/guides/storageaccelguide.php

[Ladd]

$50 is a good price for this card -- from where did Santa source it?

[willrob]

I bought it from Amazon, for the free shipping, but I also had a $25 off coupon.

[Ladd]

Ahhh, a coupon. That's the difference in prices that I'm seeing.