Hello bowb4cisco...
That is excellent news!
I'm glad you finally got things to work.
Eventually I will get Tiger, but until I scape together enough scratch I can't afford it! - I don't have the same college price discounts as you cos i'm located in Australia! Please let me know what you think of Tiger. Have you noticed a significant performance increase from Panther???
Meanwhile, back in Tumbleguts land, many things have happened.
I've done a lot of research and i'll dispense the information here for both your knowledge & understanding and anyone else who may come looking for Adaptec 39160 answers on a mac G4.
First things first, earlier in this thread you wanted to know what the OF tweak did - and whether it needed to be reversed if you were going change to an ATTO card. I found out that the OF tweak which allows a SCSI disk connected to the Adaptec card to be bootable (ie- startup disk) is a "nvram" patch/tweak. Meaning that it 'tweaks' the nvram (where the cards firmware is) on the Adaptec card. So, in answer to your concerns - if you had decided to go with another branded card - the OF tweak would not be needed to be reversed - as it only effects the Adaptec card.
(Adaptec notes that this OF tweak is needed for 29/39160 cards used in Quicksilver and later Macs to allow booting from connected drives.)
But as I also found out, it is needed and works on earlier G4 macs as well - like my G4 733mhz Digital Audio.
(See earlier posts on this thread for the link)
Second thing, Adaptec notes that the Adaptec 39160 is bootable from OS X when using "firmware 1.20" on the card (combined with the OF tweak).
(Download from Adaptec site)
And the third, (final secret ingredient) is using Adaptec driver 1.2 version.
As bowb4cisco noted - "this is the key..." Don't bother with the 1.3beta driver, because that is exactly what it is - a beta version. Untested, unverified, and that fact that Tiger ships with version 1.2 says to me that the newer beta version still isn't reliable.
(Download - mac OS X driver 1.2 - from Adaptec site)
So in summary, 3 things:
1. make sure "firmware 1.20" is on the card.
2. (for mac OS X) it's best to use Adaptec "driver 1.2" version.
3. (to make card bootable) apply "OF tweak".
If you can apply these 3 things your Adaptec card (provided all hardware is okay and termination is set properly) will work flawlessly in OS X.
oohh - I also discovered that in some cases you may need to apply the Adaptec driver 1.2 installer on all SCSI HDD - even though these HDD may not have a system folder on it. The reason is - I found if a SCSI disk (without a system folder) didn't have the driver installed, you could copy files to that disk, but not be able to copy from it (computer would freeze or endless spining beachball).
As I and bowb4cisco have found out, Adaptec has, in more ways than one, stopped supporting the mac platform. And it is almost impossible to discover what works (like the 3 simple steps above) on their website.
As noted in my earlier post, I had trouble when I attached a new SCSI drive to the SCSI chain. Unfortunately I ended up having to wipe the existing SCSI drive before I could get the Adaptec to see both drives. Although I didn't spend a huge amount of time fiddling around - this could be a major issue. Personally, if anyone knows of how to add an extra SCSI drive without reformating the existing drives, I would love to know about it!!!
Bowb4cisco and I cannot be the only fools still using the Adaptec 39160 card on a mac G4...
Okay... one last thing.
Now I've been to many forums where this was discussed, but never got a clear "yes" or "no" answer. Or how to go about setting it up for that matter.
So... here it is:
Question: Can I make a RAID setup the startup disk?
Now in mac help it states;
"In most cases. you cannot include the startup disk in a RAID set."
Apple basically says this to avoid having to support it.
And what they are getting at is that you cannot include an existing startup disk in a RAID set - (because you wipe a drive when you add it to a RAID set). However you CAN create a RAID set, put the system software on it, and then make it bootable!
So... this is what I did.
My Adaptec 39160 is dual channel - which means it has two 68pin connectors on the top, each channel a separate data path to the cards IO processor - ideal for RAID. Using my two 10K 36gb SCSI disks (best to use 2 matching drives) I attached the drives using separate cables to each of the 68pin connectors. However, you still need to create the RAID using Apple's disk utility - which supports RAID 0 (stripe) and RAID 1 (mirror) since the introduction of OS X. Or you could use RAID software such as "softraid'. I created RAID 0 (stripe) from my old ATA connected startup disk using disk utility and giving me a single 68.36GB disk. After making sure I had the "3 steps" covered (see above) I used Carbon Copy Cloner to transfer the system software from the ATA drive to the new RAID 0 (striped) array. (I first tried installing Panther on to the RAID using the install disks but it hung half way through... and didn't bother pursuing it). After using the disk utiltity to "repair permissions" on the newly cloned OS X on the RAID from the ATA startup disk, I rebooted with the RAID as the desired startup disk.
So far, everything is fantastic and I haven't had any problems. The system loads much faster, and Applications in general load twice as fast! The computer is a lot snapper and a greater pleasure to use. Using Speedtools "quickbench" I noted that I am getting an average read at 115MB/sec and average write at 125MB/sec. WOW! That is over 3 times faster than the Seagate Barracuda 80GB ATA drive connected to the inbuilt ATA/66 controller. (Always remember that generally most 7200rpm drives max out at about 35-45MB/sec regardless of interface speed). As single disks, these 10K SCSI drives were averaging 65MB/sec read/write.
Yep... I'm pretty happy!
Keep in mind that the only drawback to RAID 0 (stripe) is that if one of the disks fail - you lose everything. I'm planning to combat this by getting a single 72GB SCSI (or ATA) disk that I periodically clone the RAID contents to. Although, from my research it seems that the Apple RAID is usually very stable and it is rare for it to fail. Even so, you should always back up your important files anyway...
So... there you have it!
The Adaptec 39160 still has a place in the mac community (even in a G5).
You just can't knock transfer rates of 125MB/sec even if you're using the newer serial ATA interface!
I hope all this mumbo-jumbo is able to help others out there!!!!!
Good Luck.
