zenarcade Posted August 6, 2006 Share Posted August 6, 2006 I like many of you am yearning for the ability to use SATA drives with my system, alas I have nForce 4. I was thinking about the problem we have been having getting the VIA trick to work with nF4 and thought of the difference between nF3 and nF4. We know the nF3 works, and we also know that in some cases people run nF4 without problems. Whats the major differences between nF3 and nF4? To my knowledge the only major differences are SATAII compatibility. Whats so special about SATAII? Its faster. Now I'm know computer wizard... but is it possible that 3Gb/s is too quick for the VIA driver? What if we forced the drives we use (I'm presuming some of us if not most are using SATAII drives.) to operate at 1.5Gb/s? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdwl Posted August 6, 2006 Share Posted August 6, 2006 That has been tried and found to make no difference. The source for the Nforce4 SATA controller has additional timings not found in either the NF3 or VIA controllers - and without these in the kext corruption will always occur. Just get a SIL3112 and be done with it - NF4 is never going to work Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-156748 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jape Posted August 8, 2006 Share Posted August 8, 2006 I tried using AppleOnboardPCATA-2 timings and it failed like VIA SATA too. So I don't guess this is timings issue (unless nForce ATA timings are wrong too. Anyone wants to check them?) Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-158876 Share on other sites More sharing options...
aberracus Posted August 8, 2006 Share Posted August 8, 2006 isnt there a pci sata card we can just plug into the system to get intel ich7 or ich6 sata ports ? Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-159156 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jape Posted August 12, 2006 Share Posted August 12, 2006 Sure. Go check out Silicon Image, they just released a Universal Binary kext. http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=24254 Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-162500 Share on other sites More sharing options...
lord_muad_dib Posted August 12, 2006 Share Posted August 12, 2006 it's a well known issue that nforce4 chipset have problems with some hdds when the dma got stressed too much maybe that via kext demands too much to the chipset... maybe disabling,, command queieing and dma.. it might work anyway.. i have no free space to test it out now Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-162517 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jape Posted August 12, 2006 Share Posted August 12, 2006 it's a well known issue that nforce4 chipset have problems with some hdds when the dma got stressed too muchProblem is, I get no problems at all when using the drives on Linux 2.4 (which uses DMA & native mode with a years old amd IDE driver) and DOS (which doesn't use DMA AFAIK). It's true that I don't boot the whole OS from SATA while using these OS.... but I've been browsing the Internet & caching on the SATA disk using Konqueror, and no problems so far. On OS X just caching GMail crashes the OS and corrupts Safari's Cache. The only operating systems I usually boot from SATA disk are GNU/Linux 2.6 (nv_sata), Windows XP (both ms ide & nvidia sata drivers work OK) and OS X. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-162533 Share on other sites More sharing options...
zanonale Posted August 20, 2006 Share Posted August 20, 2006 Hey Guys. If i usa a PATA drive to install the OS X and the VIA driver, ill be able to acess my SATA drives in NTFS to access my DATA without making then corrupt? Thanks. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-170536 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jape Posted August 21, 2006 Share Posted August 21, 2006 If i usa a PATA drive to install the OS X and the VIA driver, ill be able to acess my SATA drives in NTFS to access my DATA without making then corrupt?The NTFS driver refuses to write to NTFS partitions so you should be pretty safe. We like testers, too. Data you read from the partition might be corrupt, however. Anyway, MAKE A BACKUP. You have been warned. ------ Stupidly enough, I'm not able to install OSX86 to this very same computer to the PATA disk. It fails halfway setup. Using VMware. I guess I somehow managed to corrupt the DVD... Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-170885 Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbmkgd Posted September 3, 2006 Share Posted September 3, 2006 Data you read from the partition might be corrupt, however.Hm.. I thought corruption only occured when writing on sata's (my sataII has only ntfs partitions).Up til now, have transfered many gb of dmg images from ntfs, and were not corrupted. Lucky? I'll be more carefull about this though. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-180914 Share on other sites More sharing options...
jape Posted September 3, 2006 Share Posted September 3, 2006 Hm.. I thought corruption only occured when writing on sata's.Up til now, have transfered many gb of dmg images from ntfs, and were not corrupted. Lucky? I have also experienced no reading corruption... now that I have OS X on another partition so it doesn't freeze that often, I still don't experience read corruption -- my test suite is a 1 GiB DMG image and the mounter only complains about corruption when the controller goes crazy. However, other people have experienced read corruption, so I guess luck is an interesting factor Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-180919 Share on other sites More sharing options...
cbmkgd Posted September 3, 2006 Share Posted September 3, 2006 I've just quick-read the few last pages at: http://forum.insanelymac.com/index.php?showtopic=17330 Quite impressive... The guy experiencing read corruptions stated files of 1-2 GB... I'll try that later with some 2.xGB file and check md5 before & after. I don't care right now about installing on a sata; but I'd like to keep reading from ntfs on my sata! Wondering if the (knowledgeable) people at hackint0sh and macvidia would like to tackle this too. Link to comment https://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/23612-nforce-4-sata/#findComment-180931 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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