I've got the model with mirrored bezels and it runs so-so under 10.3.9, but I needed to add storage capacity and DVD burners for our band's recording studio use, and found that other than one 160GB IDE drive the only drives available on short order here in the 3rd world are SATA units, but this Mac has no SATA support.
I checked into this in phases, and wound up with a number of parts that turned out to be unusable, such as an IDE-to-SATA converter. The only solution available on short order was to buy two PCI USB cards, each with one internal port, and then buy two external USB-to-SATA adapters and install them internally, powered off of the unused disk drive power cables.
This gives me at least the SATA drives up and running, but at a much lower speed than they are capable of.
I naively hooked up the 160GB IDE drive to the ATA-66 slot on the motherboard and it appeared to work fine at first, allowing me to partition and format it in Disk Utility, and then I could start the MacOS X 10.4 installation from DVD. The installation made it all the way to the end before apparently hanging with the spinning beachball cursor. After an hour or more of that, I did a hardware restart and it relaunched the installer DVD, as if it hadn't installed yet. I tried quitting the installer and it hung. I finally restarted again and it again booted from the DVD. I had to shut down and extract the CD at startup time to get out of that cycle. It then booted from the new installation, as if everything was fine, even though I hadn't yet chosen that as the startup drive.
I went to Startup Disk and found that I couldn't see the original 80GB drive any more. I shut it down and disconnected the new drive and it booted from the old drive just fine. Then, I shut down and reinstalled the new drive and restarted and it didn't find the new drive this time. I restarted again and it still didn't appear.
To figure this out, I started studying the various IDE, ATA and SATA specifications and found that there are different types of IDE cables, and that the new drive requires ATA-7 to overcome speed and capacity limitations of earlier versions. This means that the ATA-66 slot can't keep up and there's a good chance of data loss and/or corruption because of capacitive cross-coupling in the 40-conductor cable. Of course, I can change to an 80-conductor cable simply enough, but the speed limitations of ATA-66 are too big a speed hit when doing mixdowns and other intensive processes.
I don't know if I've gronched the new drive, or if changing the cable might make it visible in Disk Utility again, at least to allow repartitioning and reformatting, or if I'll have to do all that after getting a PCI card with the necessary interfaces. I found that the only card available locally is the Promise SATA150 TX2plus, which exactly gives the ports I need for these new drives I bought, but I haven't yet found a driver or firmware for using it with this computer. Does anyone know where I can get firmware and/or drivers for use with MacOS X? I found other PCI SATA cards on the internet, but it typically takes at least a month and US$130 to buy a card that is guaranteed to work with MacOS X. The money's the least of the problems. I don't have a month to wait around for it, so I need to get this card up and running with the drives I bought. Anyone who can help would be truly apeciated.
I checked into this in phases, and wound up with a number of parts that turned out to be unusable, such as an IDE-to-SATA converter. The only solution available on short order was to buy two PCI USB cards, each with one internal port, and then buy two external USB-to-SATA adapters and install them internally, powered off of the unused disk drive power cables.
This gives me at least the SATA drives up and running, but at a much lower speed than they are capable of.
I naively hooked up the 160GB IDE drive to the ATA-66 slot on the motherboard and it appeared to work fine at first, allowing me to partition and format it in Disk Utility, and then I could start the MacOS X 10.4 installation from DVD. The installation made it all the way to the end before apparently hanging with the spinning beachball cursor. After an hour or more of that, I did a hardware restart and it relaunched the installer DVD, as if it hadn't installed yet. I tried quitting the installer and it hung. I finally restarted again and it again booted from the DVD. I had to shut down and extract the CD at startup time to get out of that cycle. It then booted from the new installation, as if everything was fine, even though I hadn't yet chosen that as the startup drive.
I went to Startup Disk and found that I couldn't see the original 80GB drive any more. I shut it down and disconnected the new drive and it booted from the old drive just fine. Then, I shut down and reinstalled the new drive and restarted and it didn't find the new drive this time. I restarted again and it still didn't appear.
To figure this out, I started studying the various IDE, ATA and SATA specifications and found that there are different types of IDE cables, and that the new drive requires ATA-7 to overcome speed and capacity limitations of earlier versions. This means that the ATA-66 slot can't keep up and there's a good chance of data loss and/or corruption because of capacitive cross-coupling in the 40-conductor cable. Of course, I can change to an 80-conductor cable simply enough, but the speed limitations of ATA-66 are too big a speed hit when doing mixdowns and other intensive processes.
I don't know if I've gronched the new drive, or if changing the cable might make it visible in Disk Utility again, at least to allow repartitioning and reformatting, or if I'll have to do all that after getting a PCI card with the necessary interfaces. I found that the only card available locally is the Promise SATA150 TX2plus, which exactly gives the ports I need for these new drives I bought, but I haven't yet found a driver or firmware for using it with this computer. Does anyone know where I can get firmware and/or drivers for use with MacOS X? I found other PCI SATA cards on the internet, but it typically takes at least a month and US$130 to buy a card that is guaranteed to work with MacOS X. The money's the least of the problems. I don't have a month to wait around for it, so I need to get this card up and running with the drives I bought. Anyone who can help would be truly apeciated.
