I've been researching this for the last couple of days, but I haven't really gotten anywhere. Maybe someone here can help a bit.

I want to buy a SATA controller for a digital audio G4. I'm looking at the FirmTek SeriTek/1S2 because it's cheap, and it provides internal ports. Plus, it's the card that Sonnet rebrands to make their low-end SATA controller. I figure that if it's good enough for Sonnet, it's good enough for me...

But here are my questions:
1) Are drives connected to SATA controllers transportable to built-in SATA ports on, say, the Mac Pro? PCI ATA controllers use some special kabuki stuff to format the drives on the card which makes them unusable on vanilla built-in ATA controllers without reformatting.

2) What kind of performance can I expect on a G4? All the reviews talk about the PCI-X slots in a G5, and I haven't been able to find any reviews of the cards in a G4 w/ 64-bit PCI slots.

3) Are there any SATA controllers that are not bootable?

4) The PCI slots in a G4 are 33 MHz 64-bits, right?

Peace,
Drew
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Power to the PowerPC!

1. I have not heard of anybody having problems moving sATA drives around like that. an eSATA drive if your card has it should work with any card without reformatting, as well.

2. SATA-3gbps (current generation) pretty much outstrips the max performance a mac with PCI slots will probably ever have on the PCI bus, as far as I know. If the card will work on the 64bit pci bus, then it will probably have approximately the same performance on PCI-X, because although there are special PCI-X slots, PCI-X will let any given card run at its own max speed.

3. I'm not sure of this one, I've heard most of 'em are bootable, but I'm not sure whether or not that applies to oldworld macs too, or whether or not you'd be able to move a boot disc from one g4-with-sata to another g4-with-sata (or a g5 or intel mac, for that matter...)

4. "and four full-length 64-bit, 33 MHz PCI slots." (~everymac.com, digiAudio466 specs)

sidenote: if anybody wants to test whether this card works in an oldworld pci powermac with OS 7.5 or 7.6, I'd be thankful. The sonnet card does, but that's more expensive.

Also, standard-HFS is capable of formatting drives that big, but to get the most optimal use of the space, you'd either need to live with 3-meg text files, or you could use Disc Copy to create 4-gig-or-less disc images for storing standard documents and whatever.

Another benefit of that would be that you could make the disc images to DVD-RW or CD-RW size for easy backup (copy to other mac over the network, burn, rinse, repeat)

I've yet to test this (and i do intend to) but I want to find out whether or not ASIP5 can share disc images out directly (over localtalk to 68k macs, for example) or if you need have disc copy on the 68k macs, and mount the images like that, over the network. If you did that, would you be able to enforce permissions though, I wonder?

Oh the things I eventuallyhave to test.
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I suppose most of my ASIP questions apply also to big scsi and ide discs for macs that have those controllers. if, for example, i wanted to shove a 40 gig drive into my UMAX c600 and use that as a multihoming/appletalk-bridging file/print server for my new and old macs.

(Since I'm too cheap to get ethernet for all the 68ks, but I do already have the c600 and big ide disks to spare. )
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1) Yes if no-system. System disks will not boot at x86 because of Apple Partition Scheme used on PowerPC, in x86 Mac OS X uses GUID.

2) Sonnet/SeriTek SATA controller has a 150MB/s (Actually 133 MB/s because of IDE emulation for Classic OS compatibility). PCI-64 33MHz - have 266MB/s (just for two ports enough). But, classic Hard Disk Drives actually have a poor performance, only ones have riches to ~100MB/s. I am used a Solid State Drive, it is expensive, but it really fast. Up to all 150MB/s Read and 130-140MB/s for write in practice without any RAID levels.

3) Any Sonnet, SeriTek, Espada that builded on other than Sil3112 and VIA chipsets.

4) Affirmative. PCI64 - extended version of PCI v.2.1 for 64-bit and 32-bit cards. Throughput 266MB/s.
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To Be Continued...