USB 2.0 to Ultra SCSI adapters can be used with Ultra Wide SCSI Devices. Ratoc offers three SCSI host adapter models: The FR1SX (FW-USCSI-01) FireWire to Ultra SCSI, the U2SCX (USB-USCSI-01) USB to Ultra SCSI, and the U2SCX-LVD (USB-UWSCSI-01) USB to Ultra Wide SCSI. The FR1SX and U2SCX feature a HD-50 connector and are native Ultra SCSI devices. Have a pre-sales question regarding a Sonnet product? Please contact Sonnet at 1-949-472-2772 or email. Phone & Email Support Email: support@sonnettech.com Email support requests generally receive the fastest responses, and are usually processed within a 24-hour period during normal business hours, excluding holidays. Adaptec’s USBXchange functions as a terrific bridge device between your old Mac’s SCSI port and any USB device you care to hook into it. Mac OS 8 and 9 drivers may be difficult to.
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- The Sonnet Tempo sells for $99 at Sonnet's Online Store including a cable with three connectors. (FLASH: Since posting this page, Sonnet Technologies has announced they will offer this product under a joint venture with Acard.
So far in this “pimp my ride” series, we have looked at upgrading the video subsytem of our Power Macintosh 7300/200 with an ATI Radeon 7000 Mac Edition video card (not much impact) and upgrading the CPU from the stock 200 MHz PowerPC 604e to a 400 MHz PowerPC G3 (BIG impact). In this last installment of our upgrade saga, we will look at upgrading the stock SCSI hard drive to an ATA-66 interfaced IDE drive.
The stock SCSI hard drive that shipped with the Power Macintosh 7300/200 may be many things, but FAST was not one of them. Using the Intech Hard Disk Speed Tools benchmarking program, I was able to measure the maximum transfer rate of the SCSI drive in my 7300 at about 9 MB/s. The graph below tells the tale.
Now, there is nothing wrong with this number. 10 MB/s is the advertised speed for Apple’s “Fast SCSI”, but to put this number in context, today’s SATA hard drives operate in the GB/s transfer range. Even the older IDE technology delivered up to 133 MB/s transfer speeds. 9 MB/s, while absolutely in spec, is simply SLOW!
To overcome this, I purchased on eBay a Sonnet Tempo ATA-66 IDE interface card. This PCI interfaced internal expansion card promised up to 66 MB/s transfer speeds, a worthy jump in performance vs. the existing SCSI drive. I happened to have a Seagate 3120814A 120 GB IDE hard drive in stock, and so I installed that into the second drive bay of the 7300.
I then installed the Sonnet Tempo ATA-66 into a spare PCI slot and connected an IDE cable from it to the newly installed Seagate IDE drive. For those that know about such things, I was careful to use the higher speed double conductor type of IDE cable, so as to get maximum speed out of the interface.
I restarted the machine and went into Drive Setup (the standard Apple utility, usually found in the Utilities folder of the boot drive). It obligingly found the drive and offered to initialize it. I will spare you the gory details of that process, but I partitioned the physical drive into several logical drives (one for use as a general files partition, one for use as a second Mac OS partition, and finally, two for a later Linux install on this machine) and initialized each one. That done, I now had no fewer than 5 logical drives showing up on my Mac OS desktop.
How fast was this new disk? Had I accomplished the 66 MB/s I was hoping for? I reran the Hard Disk Speed Tools benchmark, and got a disappointing 31 MB/s.
This is still more than 3X the speed of the stock SCSI drive, but was only half of what should have been possible. I swapped IDE cables, I swapped out the Tempo ATA-66 for another Tempo and generally tried everything I could think of, but nothing would induce the interface to run any faster. I still haven’t solved this mystery, but 31 MB/s IS still a lot better than 9 MB/s, and so I decided to proceed with the testing based on this slower, but still much faster, hard drive and interface.
Clearly, to do any meaningful testing, I needed to be able to boot from, and run applications from, the IDE drive. The Sonnet Tempo ATA-66 box and documentation was very clear that this interface supported booting of the Macintosh and so I proceeded under that premise.
It was MUCH too much work to install a new version of Mac OS onto this new drive just for the purposes of testing, and so I took a very convenient shortcut. I simply copied my entire SCSI boot volume, folder by folder, to a partition of the IDE disk. I then “blessed” the system folder of this copy of my boot disk (if “blessing” of a system folder is a mystery to you, it is the arcane but simple process of making a Mac OS system folder bootable). Finally, I went into the Startup Disk X control panel and selected the new drive to boot from.
All set and ready to boot! Stop watch in hand, I hit the power button and timed the boot sequence. It clocked in at 1 minute and 40 seconds, or 100 seconds, from power up chime to the appearance of the control strip on the booted desktop. This may sound slow to you when examined through the lens of today, but this was GOOD! Prior to all of the upgrades undertaken as a part of this series, the equivalent boot time was 2 minutes and 57s, or 177 seconds.
However, I must note that after just the CPU upgrade undertaken earlier in this series, the boot time was already down to 2 minute and 5s, or 125s. Compared to the new time of 100 seconds this implies that booting from the 3X faster IDE hard drive hadn’t really bought me anything close to a 3X improvement. How could this be? As we noted in the CPU upgrade part of this series, it seems that booting is both CPU bound and disk bound.
What about other performance metrics? After the machine was booted, I tested a few programs that I had comparative metrics for:
– Photoshop 6.0 Load Time: 12 seconds (vs. 27 seconds from SCSI drive)
– Corel Word Perfect 3.5e Load Time: 2 seconds (vs. 3 seconds from SCSI drive)
The improvement in Photoshop load time was impressive; Word Perfect less so, but still good.
Looking at the above, the net result of this decidedly unscientific examination of the relative speed impact of using a 3X faster IDE hard drive vs. the stock SCSI hard drive is that it had an observable impact. Booting was faster, but not THAT much faster, implying that booting was bound by more than just disk I/O. Some program launches were more than 2X faster, while others were only 50% faster or so.
In summary, I think we can conclude that upgrading the hard drive of your Power Macintosh from SCSI to IDE is a worthy step, and one that will deliver you observable performance gains. Critically, booting is faster and program launching is faster. These two areas factor large in the subjective impression of the “speed” of a machine, and this all by itself makes a SCSI -> IDE upgrade well worth considering.
That’s it for this installment! Stay tuned for final post in this series, a wrap up of all of the upgrade steps taken to date.
I'm getting email almost daily asking, 'When are you going to test Sonnet's $99 Tempo card?' I wasn't too excited at first about redoing the test graphs for a card that I understood to be YAAiD ('yet another Acard in disguise'). But when I used it to set up a striped array on a Sawtooth, its WRITE speed surprised me.TEST CONCLUSIONS
1. The UltraTek/66 produced higher sustained READ times than any other Ultra ATA PCI card using SoftRAID to create a striped array.
2. The 'A-hard' produced highest sustained READs of the Ultra ATA cards due to being true hardware based RAID0. This card is unique. By flipping a switch, you can create a striped array of two drives. SoftRAID isn't needed. The drives don't have to match either. ONE OF THE BIG ADVANTAGES is the ability to boot from this hardware array. No IDE arrays created with SoftRAID can be used as startup volumes. (FLASH: Since posting this page, Sonnet Technologies has announced they will offer this product under a joint venture with Acard. They call it the Tempo RAID66 and offer in-depth documentation and installation guide. )
3. All cards produced high sustained WRITE speeds when installed on a G4/Yikes, graphically illustrating the design flaw in the Sawtooth. The surprise exception was the Sonnet Tempo, which attained 37MB/sec. Not as fast as on the Yikes but significantly faster than any other card tested on the Sawtooth.
When I was briefed by Sonnet Marketing, I asked if they were tweaking the firmware knowing they were using Acard as an OEM supplier. They said, 'No.' So how do they account for the fact that it WRITES faster than the other cards on the Sawtooth? Maybe Sonnet Engineering did something and forgot to tell Marketing. ;-)
4. On the Acard and all cards based on it (TurboMAX & Tempo), I observed a strange phenomenon in single drive mode. The transfer rate drops to zero when file size reaches 8MB or larger. (What's with that???!!! Oooga boooga??) I received an email from the individual who co-authored the firmware for the TurboMAX33 and UltraTek/66. He pointed out that Finder typically breaks files down into smaller than 8MB chunks but that there is no guarantee that Finder or any application will not try to transfer larger than 8MB chunks at some point. If that were attempted, the user's data would be ruined. (Editor's NOTE: Firmware version 3.0.7 is supposed to fix this but all it does is increase the maximum file size to 8MB + 64K so the flaw doesn't show up in the ExpressPRO Tools test.)
WHERE TO BUY
The UltraTek/66 is available from VST Technology direct for a special price of $170. But Buy.Com has it for $155. It's also listed on Onvia.com. Check also with OtherWorldComputing and Small Dog. I think the VST is a great value. The price of the VST UltraTek/66 includes a copy of SoftRAID, dual cables, and brackets for extra drives. SoftRAID alone would cost you $149. It's like you're buying SoftRAID and cables but getting the card for FREE!!!
The Acard AEC-6260M Ultra ATA/66 PCI card can be ordered direct from the Acard website for $129. Check their web site for the latest firmware release for the Mac. The 'A-hard' is model AEC-6860M with Hardware IDE RAID for $199. (FLASH: Since posting this page, Sonnet Technologies has announced they will offer this product under a joint venture with Acard. They call it the Tempo RAID66 and offer in-depth documentation and installation guide. )
ProMax TurboMAX/66 is available from their web site or from OtherWorldComputing. Although it's based on the Acard, the firmware is supposedly optimized for video playback.
The Sonnet Tempo sells for $99 at Sonnet's Online Store including a cable with three connectors. (FLASH: Since posting this page, Sonnet Technologies has announced they will offer this product under a joint venture with Acard. They call it the Tempo RAID66 and offer in-depth documentation and installation guide. )
RELATED TESTSBare Feats Compares two Ultra ATA arrays to various Ultra SCSI combinations.
George Cole of OWC tested a Blue & White G3/500 with Dual 40GB Maxtors connected to a TurboMax/33 in a striped array as well as a Dual 45GB IBM 75GXP's connected to a TurboMax66.
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Barney Buoy tested a G4/400 Yikes for XLR8YOURMAC with dual IBM 75GXP's in a striped array using the Acard.
TEST CONFIGURATION AND PROCEDURES
The test machines: An Apple Power Mac G4/400 Yikes and a G4/400 Sawtooth
The Ultra ATA controllers:
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Built-in Ultra ATA/66 controller of Sawtooth
SmartDisk/VST UltraTek/66 (Courtesy of VST Technology )
Acard AEC-6260M Ultra ATA66 PCI and AEC-6860M 'AHARD' RAID PCI (Courtesy of Acard) (FLASH: Since posting this page, Sonnet Technologies has announced they will offer this product under a joint venture with Acard. They call it the Tempo RAID66 and offer in-depth documentation and installation guide. )
ProMax TurboMAX/66 PCI (courtesy of ProMax)
Sonnet Tempo (Courtesy of Sonnet Technology)
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The Ultra ATA drives were:
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/66+ with 2MB cache
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 46GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA/66+ with 2MB cache (courtesy of Other World Computing)
The Ultra3 SCSI controller:
ATTO ExpressPCI Dual-Channel Ultra3 or UL3D (courtesy of ATTO Technology)
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The SCSI drives:
Two Quantum Atlas V 9GB drives (courtesy of Other World Computing)
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The sustained READ/WRITE speeds were obtained using Express-Pro Tools 2.3.2 benchmark test with 8MB maximum file size and system disk cache disabled. Sustained Rate is displayed in the charts. Peak rates can be impressive but do not reflect typical drive performance.