Sonnet Technologies ATA-133 Tempo ATA/133 PCI Card for Macintosh

Sonnet Technologies ATA-133 Tempo ATA/133 PCI Card for Macintosh

Sonnet Tempo ATA-133 PCI Adapter - So, you've been using your Macintosh for video editing & capture, but you're finding your current hard drive space lacking? Just add another drive. What, no more IDE ports? Well that's easily solved with Sonnet's Tempo ATA133 Adapter. This card easily pops into a free PCI slot, giving you the ability to connect up to 4 more IDE hard drives! What's more, is this card supports the fast transfer rates of ATA133. But don't worry, it's backwards compatible with slower speeds. Achieve a maximum data transfer rate of 133MB per second Boots from any attached hard drive One cable is included (good for 2 drives) Supports Mac OS 8.0 through Mac OS X
Customer Review: ATA-133 Tempo ATA/133 PCI card for Mac
I purchased the card originally to go in an older G3 B&W which would not run the larger hard drives. I had tried several other boards for the PC, but the Mac would not recognize any of them. This was pricy compared to the other PC only cards, but the advertisement said it would work in a Mac. When it arrived, I plugged it in and turned on the Mac. Nothing unusual happened, and I wondered if it was working. I checked under system profiler, and it saw the card! So I turned off the computer, got my 200 MB HD, plugged it in using Master/Slave settings (as a Master) settings, and turned it back on. The HD was seen on the first try. No set up or fiddling with FDISK or anything. It needed to be initialized, but Disk Utility came up and asked if I wanted it initialized, and I said YES, and it did its thing. I then partitioned it into 3 partitions, and put another boot sector on one of the partitions, and now I had an emergency boot disk! Nothing could be simplier!

The only problem I have now (five hard drives in the Mac G4) is that the slave drives cannot have boot partitions on them. That's not a limitation of the card, but of the ATA scheme.

My neighbor was given an older B/W mac and since this was an upgrade from her original iMac, I told her I would set it up for her free of charge. Boy, was that ever a mistake. I thought her Mac was identical to my old G3, but it turned out, hers was an original issue G3 B&W and with OS X it would not recognize any hard drive except the 12GB that came with it and it corrupted any drive which had OS X on it! There was no way around the problem, although I tried every trick in the book, including some no one else ever thought of. Finally, I ordered another ATA-133 card and stuck that one in there, and the problem was solved! No more corrupt drives, and she could use a larger HD. -- But I was out the money it costs for the card, as well as a new hard drive since I ruined her original 12 GB! So much for free work! But the Sonnet Tech ATA-133 Card saved the day for the computer! It worked without drivers or set up -- true Plug and Play (not Plug and pray like in the PC world!)

Yes, the cost is a little high (that's why the 4 stars instead of 5) but the ease of install and use is what Mac users are used to.