SATA drive freezes while copying

Factor41

Factor41

Wishful Drinking
Can anyone please help me, i'm going out of my mind?!

I've just got a SerialATA card (SIIG two-channel card from OWC) and a 200GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive. I've installed both into my Quicksilver G4/867 with OS X 10.3.8 and the drive has shown up and formatted fine.

Now when I copy files over it all seems fine, but when I copy a big chunk, after a while it just stops. No error, no noise, just stops. Little bar freezes in its window and I can't stop the transfer or do anything. If I try to start another copy, the Finder goes to beach ball and can't be relaunched.

There are three drives in my G4, a 40Gb with the OS on, and 80Gb that I'm copying off and the new 200Gb i'm copying to. 40 and 80 are on the on-board ATA, the 200 on the SATA card. All are 7200rpm Seagate Barracudas.

I've tried the drive on both ports on the SATA card, exactly the same result with each.

If I can't copy files to the drive then it's effectively useless to me. Can anyone see any reason why this would be happening? Would it be a power issue? My tower had a free power cable and the drives all show up on the desktop fine, so I'm guessing it's not that. I have no drivers and nothing to configure with the card. Am i missing something obvious?! Would really appreciate any help.
 
Did you reformat the drive as Mac HFS+ ?
I believe the DOS compatible format can't handle files bigger than 2 GB.
 
The drive is formatted as HFS+ Journaled (same as the 80). Can't be a heat issue because it did it straight away - computer was off before the drive was installed. Plus everything's very neat and tidy in there.

I have tried the SATA card in different PCI slots, tried it on both SATA ports, tried without the 80GB drive in so it's not a power issue. Even tried the SATA cable the other way round, just in case! Each time it keeps doing it. Seems to be copying fine, then just stops. The window continues to say Time remaining: less than a minute, but the drives go quiet, with none of the normal noises when they're actually doing stuff. There's no way out, other than forcing a power restart (force quit/relaunch just hangs the machine).

Thanks for the replies. Still none the wiser tho :(

Ooh, just found that if I leave it hung for ages and AGES, eventually it gives an error saying that the file it had got to cannot be read. Then it hangs some more. This isnt an issue with that file though, because whatever I copy, it eventually gets to something it doesn't like and hangs. I'm certain my drive isn't completely screwed. It just seems random. Think it was a type-36.
 
Was holding off upgrading to 10.3.9 - didn't want to risk any more problems! Might try a fresh install on the new drive, see if that helps.

C'mon, heeere Tiger, Tiger, Tiger....
 
i've had the same problem with a siig ultraATA (ide) card. no problems with drives connected to the onboard ata controller. i'm pretty sure it's a card issue, not an OS issue, since i've tried with 10.4 and 10.3... and that i've had no issues with the onboard controller (with the exception of the 128gb limit... i've got 160gb drives)
 
Not got hold of Tiger yet, but have a Sonnet SATA card on its way so I'll let you know if that works. Thought there may be a drive size issue so formatted my SATA drive into 4 small partitions with no success. 10.3.9 didn't help either. It's looking a lot like being that card.
 
Problem solved!

The solution was a simple, but effective one - the SIIG card is rubbish. Popped a Sonnet Tempo 2-channel card in (the exact equivalent, but purple instead of red!) and bingo, copied 18GB of photos onto the drive without even the slightest hesitation.

The SIIG card claims to "break the 137GB barrier", but couldn't hack copying 100MB of pics onto my 200GB drive, a task the Sonnet breezed. So in summary, if you want a Serial ATA card for your Mac, pay the bit extra and get the Tempo, cos it actually works.

--

For sale : One pretty red PCI card. Might be useful for small S-ATA drives. All original packaging, virtually brand new. Never raced or rallied. Sold as seen, no guarantees!
 
Are you planning on putting your OS on the SATA drive, as it is faster you would probably see some sort of a performance boost when running off of it.

That is what I would do anyways...
 
Possibly, was thinking of shifting the system over to it when I swap to Tiger. I get through a ridiculous amount of photos though so might keep that drive purely for pics and get a second SATA drive for the other channel to entirely replace my current system 40Gb drive. It's faster doing my pics stuff anyway, now they're all on it.
 
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