New SATA PCI card findings
by
zen
This will be brief... as there really isn't much to tell, but a more recent finding has changed everything for me.
About three or four years ago, I had come to the conclusion that booting from SATA PCI cards was only about 99.9% stable. This is because every so often things would just lock up system-wide, and I would be forced to do a hard boot. Not a good thing when you're smack dab in the middle of important work. After tolerating it for a couple years... I finally decided that I would stick to SATA card attached drives for storage only, and boot from IDE/PATA drives instead.
About four or five months ago, I realized that during all those system lockups I had drive sleep enabled. So I decided to try it for a while without any type of sleep enabled, other than display sleep, which has no effect whatsoever on hard drives. I never use system sleep, as my systems are always 24/7 on, but I normally use drive and display sleep on every OS.
So I have now been running a WD Caviar Black 2TB as my boot drive for about five months, with drive sleep disabled on every OS, and have never once had an issue. I have now found 100% reliability with SATA card booting!
The WD Black is the perfect drive to use in a system where drives don't sleep, because it's built for higher endurance than most drives, and has more performance to go along with that.
I had already tried every version of firmware for my FirmTek SATA cards, and nothing solved it, but disabling drive sleep did. The only real difference now in my computing habbits is that I need to unmount all the externals I'm not using, since they are typically backup drives, and don't go to sleep any longer.
Keep in mind that these finding are all based off use in two Sawtooth, along with one Gigabit Ethernet system.
Anyway, I had told some readers in the past via comments that SATA card booting wasn't 100% stable, and I just wanted to share how I did find that sweet spot on my hardware.
For the record... this is all with the FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 PCI controller; I own three. The Sonnet 2-port PCI is the same card, as they are made for Sonnet by FirmTek. By the way... the best firware to use in G4 towers is 5.1.3. You still need to disable drive sleep, but the newer firmware (5.3.x) is meant for early G5's with standard PCI, and most of these cards ship with the newer version. So if you have a G4, and you have the 5.3.x firmware, you need to downgrade to 5.1.3 for best results. You can download the 5.1.3 firmware here.
Please share any SATA PCI controller stories and findings you may have in comments.
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Well, I have to state that I find enough good the performance of IDE drives on PowerMacs G4, and I used to boot from them. Few months ago I discovered Lacie eSata PCI cards that are fully working and boot ready over osX and Linux. So it's the way to go for me, really good reliability, never hangs till today.
ReplyDeleteIt's not about performance for me, you know that.
DeleteFor me it's about the fact that IDE/PATA drives are getting more and more rare. AFAIK, WD is the only company still making them, and they're still hard as hell to get your hands on one in stock anywhere.
The main point is that moving forward I needed a 100% reliable SATA card booting option, and found it.
By the way... low energy drives like the WD Green still use their own built-in sleep-type functions, with no effect on stability or anything else. In my findings it's when the OS gets involved in putting a drive to sleep that SATA PCI booting gets sketchy.
I can see the point of the reliability. Every time I see a "brand new" IDE/PATA Deskstar drive I try to grab it, and I have some as spares for the powermac army.
ReplyDeleteAt the moment I am experimenting with a WD Velociraptor 80 GB on a powermac with osX and Linux to see how stable is on the long term run.
I would say that in your case you have one of the most reliable SATA cards, everything from Firmtek or Sonnet seem to be the best choice for our towers.
If you buy Deskstar's on ebay, be sure you get a Hitachi, not IBM. Hitachi bought the rights to IBM HD tech and really improved it. When they were made by IBM they were nicknamed the Deathstar, because they were so unreliable.
DeleteShortly after IBM released them to market, they actual put out a public recommendation to only have them powered on for a total of 8 hours per day to reduce customer data loss.
They eventually realized they were better CPU makers, and sold the HD tech rights to Hitachi, which have really turned it around. I consider Hitachi Deskstar drives some of the most reliable consumer drives ever made.
I just wanted to explain the history for you or anyone else who cares.
Remember... DON'T BUY IBM HD's! Unless you like losing data.
Interesting just wondered if you or anyone out there knows if the Selmos Internal Raid Controller with Sil3114 Chipset which is Linux & works with a G4 DP 1.25 MHz PPC running Debian ?
ReplyDeleteWhen mixing RAID and x86 controllers in a G4 tower, you're pretty much asking for trouble.
DeleteI could be wrong, but I highly doubt you would have success. You can still get your hands on these FirmTek cards, which also support Linux, BSD etc.