SATA? In an old world PCI Power Mac?! IMPOSSIBRU! (Updated 11/22/23)

phipli

Tinkerer
Sep 23, 2021
157
138
43
Thanks! Does anyone have a solution for an OS9 card?
If you can find a Sonnet Tempo Serial ATA, that would work great - but they're expensive.

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Or something like a Firmtek / Seritek 1S2... but they rarely turn up. Until recently you could actually still get them new.

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They're basically the same card and both will boot Classic Mac OS from System 7 and up. Once you get to OS X it tends to depend on the exact version of the firmware and the driver combined with the version of OSX I think.

The cheap option is to get a generic card based on the same Sil3112 chip that those two cards use and flash them to use that firmware. There are a couple of little complications, especially to do with G4s and sleep, and sometimes beige G3s, but you should be fine with your 7600 if that was what I saw you mention.

I haven't read the start of this thread, but given the title, but I'd guess this thread has more detail on this already?
 

bakkus

Moderator
Staff member
Mar 18, 2022
92
65
18
I feel like this thread has come full circle :D
Yes, the methods outlined in this thread work for OS9 - hell, I've even done OS 7.6!

What kicked off this whole endeavour was the scarcity of the Seritek and the Sonnet cards.
So yes, what's done here is flash off-the-shelf "modern" hardware with modded FW so they work in our beloved old-school macs.
I'm pretty sure this recipe has been successfully done on a TAM as well.
I personally know of 4400, 9600, G3, Sawtooth, MDD - I'm sure there are more.