On Feb 9, 2010, at 2:23 PM, t...@io.com wrote:
The built-in IDE on the Beige is only 16 MB/s. It just begs for an ATA-133 PCI card, although cable routing is a pain.
An ATA-133 card is going to be limited to ATA-66 speed because of the bus limitations of the Beige. The only advantage of an ATA-133 card over some ATA-100 cards and all ATA-66 cards is the LBA48 support for HDs greater than 128 GB.
Another way to get quicker HD response is using XPF to boot from a Firewire 400 external HD. This is cheap and gets rid of both the 1st 8 GB limit and the 128 GB limit, which only the ATA-133 card would also do, but normally at higher total cost and less usage flexibility.
Also, in my mind there isn't really room for an ATA card in a Beige. With only three PCI slots, you need one for the Radeon video card, one for a USB card, and one for a Firewire card. If you boot OS 9, the USB card MUST be an OHCI USB 1.1 card, which means that for OS X you'll probably want a combo card with USB 2.0 & Firewire 400 in one card. I suppose you could squeeze in an ATA card by using a Sonnet Tempo Trio card, but that's an expensive card and doesn't get you much over simply booting from Firewire to begin with.
On Feb 9, 2010, at 3:18 PM, Clark Martin wrote:
But consider the cost of a PCI IDE card. It'll likely be more cost effective to move up to a newer model that has a faster IDE bus built in. I just bought a MDD on e-bay for $100, that's not much more than an IDE card.
I totally agree. Upgrading these old Beige Macs is generally not cost effective. The "sweet spot" has moved to newer Macs, with the MDD sitting near ground zero for this moment in time.
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