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IDE PCI Cards with Leopard: Any success?


KirbySaysHi
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I've got that damn JMicron IDE controller, and I'm sick of it. However, I still need at least one PATA connection. Has anyone found an IDE expansion card that works reliably with Leopard? I've been searching for a day now, and occasionally I read of "lists of ones that work" but never the list itself. Does anyone have a suggestion?

 

Thanks!

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Bump.

 

No one? I really need this... even a place to start would be extremely helpful, I'm sure especially to all those p35-ds3x users out there with 4gb or more ram and a bunch of hard drives... maybe I'm better off building a file server computer.

 

Yeah.. as I said before man, it will be stupidly hard to find one. How about a USB<->IDE bridge?

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Ok. Some more research turned up these cards:

 

For a real mac: http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product....mp;type1_idno=3

For a pc (and cheaper): http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product....mp;type1_idno=3

 

Apparently the only difference is the firmware.

 

So my question is: which one should I get given the specs of my desktop in my signature? I could really use a knowledgeable response!

 

EDIT:

 

Or, I could buy another sata card..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16816132008

 

and two ide to sata converters:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16812206002

 

it's more expensive, but it's practically guaranteed to work, according to the 10.5.1 HCL. comments?

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There will be zero support unless a driver is available on your DVD for X. I've tried lots of cards at work for just this reason and they all don't work.

 

They had chips ranging from Silicon Image, Promise Technology. It seems very few (if any) of the PCI expansion cards use standard chipsets, but rather allot of expansion cards use chipsets that are pseudo RAID chip controllers.

 

I would not bet the farm just yet that the PCI-E SATA controller will work. Unless you are sure that Mac OS X has drivers for that controller, or if the controller has an emulation mode that mimics standard IDE drives.

 

USB/Firewire may be your best option at the moment untill a nice expansion card that is X friendly is available. I always get new cards at work, I'd be willing to test them out.

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Well if no PCI cards are supported, then why my PCI 8139d Realtek based NIC worked out of the box?

 

Yeah, you should have internal usb plugs on your mobo; just reroute them to the USB-IDE bridge and keep it inside the box.

For example one of the USB that leads to the front panel.

I think some of internal HDD enclosures (those that fit in 5" bay) have USB bridges.

It's a bit of an extra pain, but I have done that before and it worked alright.

 

Let me know.

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Real Macintosh machines no longer support PCI devices, with only the Mac Pro systems having PCI-E expansion ability.

 

Standard X86 hardware will support PCI for some time, but the main issue is that you need drivers. An example is the work Taruga is doing with regards to sound cards on motherboards running OS X 86. These are PCI devices but each motherboard has unique ways of implementing hardware as each vendor designs chips differently. I tried about 5 different ALC883 dumps for my board and none worked till finally I just installed Linux on the box and dumped the codec myself. So there is a prime example of how complex the chips can be. Alot of work has been done to patch OS X86 to recognize the more common PCI devices like wireless devices but even then sometimes a little "jiggery pokery" as Sylvester Mcoy used to say is required to get something working.

 

At work I have probably 2 or 3 generic no-name PCI SATA/IDE controller boards and I will try each one and see if there are any drivers. I can also check my suppliers as they often will list what chip is used.

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