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Apple IDE Cannot Access Beyond 137GB
An anonymous reader writes: "iMacLinux reported on a PenguinPPC story about Apple hardware being unable to address more than 137GB of space on IDE drives. The Apple computers only have ATA-66, which can only address 28 bits, while ATA-100/133 can address 48 bits. Solutions include using a PCI controller, FireWire or SCSI."
And Macs are "all PCI based" and you can easily upgrade them as well. C'mon, think.
Now, while Apple's FireWire support is certainly commendable, lack of USB 2.0 (in a slight war with Intel in competition with Firewire) and the inferior hard drives that ship with even the best machines is lackluster at best.
It is time to let Apple know that drive performance is just as high on our list as such cool things as 1394. I can't plug my DV camcorder up to it (which certainly does reduce marketing value), but a fast IDE bus is still extremely important.
If you're in the mac market, or own one now, make sure to let Apple sales know what you think.
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Drew Streib, dtype.org
I seem to recall that when firewire was being develped (some time before it actually debuted on the B&W powermacs), there was talk about an internal version of firewire that would have a significanly faster transfer rate. Unfortunately, it doesn't ever seem to have come about.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
I assume Apple (like myself) is waiting for deployment of serial ATA technology; this will get around the current size restrictions as well as offer other improvements. I had hoped it would be available by now, but it seems it will be another year or so before it is even targeted for high end consumer level products.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
And if you own an imac or a cube, exactly where do you put the PCI card? C'mon, think!
I mean, if you're going to address that much hard drive space, wouldn't you use SCSI anyway?
Apple's online store shows the dual 1 GHz systems with 2x80 GB ATA drives, but with an option to do 3x72 GB Ultra 160 SCSI drives. Then, of course there's always FireWire.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
Seriously, the problem and the solution were all neatly bundled up into this story. Hey, I bet a standard Mac can only use 4 IDE devices before you have to add another hard drive controller. *Gasp*. I assume people who need more devices add appropriate upgrades.
Is there such a thing as a 'native firewire' drive?
Can having an ATA controller in a firewire case make it possible to get around the motherboard limitations?
1) Yes, it is possible to have a "native" firewire drive. However, since nobody but apple has an internal firewire port, no drive manufacturer is going to make one. They'll stick with bridge chipsets and cheap IDE disks.
2) Yes, a FireWire bridge is the second best method to get around chipset limitations. The best is to use a PCI expansion card, as the PCI bus is (currently) faster than FireWire in terms of transfer speeds.
By the way, I'm don't think it's necessarily correct to say the Apple hardware doesn't support ATA/100 and therefore doesn't support large disks. It seems the article and some of the posts here are confusing speed with large capacity capability. You can still do 48bit LBA in PIO mode if you want. Just this week I stuck a 160BG drive in an ancient Pentium 100 computer--and I used the whole disk (why you ask? It was for a backup server--large disk, extra cheap computer sitting around). There's no way the on-board IDE chip could have been ata/100 compliant. However, linux plus the ATA patch I installed supported the 48 Bit LBA commands from the ATA-6 spec, so I was able to use the whole disk. In PIO mode too. :-)
:)
I mention this because it's quite possible that the solution to this problem is a little software update from Apple. You computer may not be obsolete yet.
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
This sounds like an ATA/66 issue, not an Apple issue. What's the deal with all this spin?
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OOOOO... BURN... Seriously, the ATA thing is really a non-issue. If you have an iMac or a Cube, you didn't buy it for expandability. i have a 100GB crive in mine, but I don't think I'll go any bigger. If you have a tower, you get a PCI card, just like any PC user that doesn't have bleeding-edge technology. No biggie. Personally, I prefer LOTS of hard drives over a few big ones. When OS X RAID starts working propperly.... Oh... I see colors....
I have PC 133 in my Mac now. Oh yes, they have this wonderful card (yes I know you'd have to pay for it) called the Acard 6880-M. It ran me about 159 for the card and I bought 2 ata133 Maxtors and lemme tell you... these things are fast. I get about 160 throughput in benchmarks. Its a hardware based raid card, so it works in OS 9 and OS X perfectly. I only wish they'd fix the rom so it would sleep and spin down the disks. I have 220 gig across 4 drives and its pretty sweet. Even if they move to 133, I'd still move this card over for the RAID aspects.
People think Microsoft is the answer. Microsoft is just the question, "No" is the answer.
Firewire over glass fibre tops out at 3.2Gbs
3200 / 8 equals roughly 400 MegaBytes per second.
Show me a drive that can saturate that!
New G4's have Ultra ATA-100, at least according to the guys at my local "Genius Bar". I know the specs on apple.com simply say "Ultra-ATA", that's why I asked. Planning on getting me one of those 933 pups here in a month or so... And for all the "Apple is slow" guys out here, my 667 TiBook running OS X totally runs circles around my old P-III/600 running either Linux or Win2K, and it's a lot easier to look at too.
cat
Macs do things a bit differently than PCs. A PC hard drive will work fine in a mac (I have my G3 here running a new Maxtor D740X), but you have to 'prep' them first, because Macs put patches + low-level stuff on the drive itself. If you throw a PC orphaned drive into a mac, run Drive Setup on it and totally wipe it, or use 'dd bs=512 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/harddriveyouwantwiped' if you do Linux on your mac. Be careful with 'dd' it's far too powerful to toy with.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
I think you have it backwards. The PC of two years ago is MORE than enough for most endusers. I have a lot of hardware here in my cave, and I can say that I can barely feel the difference when web browsing, typing, emailing, etc. between my 400MHz machines and my 1400MHz machines. We have hardware that is far beyond adequate for most user's needs. Apple is focusing on their OS rather than their hardware. I think we need more innovation and advances in human interfaces, network transparency, and other software-side aspects of computing, not 18 BazigaHertz DDRAMBUS PCI-X MiniCrays on our desks. Apple is going somewhere with this whole UNIX/airport/gigabit lan/appliance thing, trust me.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
400 Megabyts/second exeeds the speed of Apple's PCI bus 33mhz/32bits wide @ 133 Megabytes per second. The bottleneck transfers to the ageing PCI bus. When the PCI bus saturates, the CPU must imediately stop whatever it was doing to wait for the PCI bus to transfer to memory. Like putting 50 series slicks on a yugo, you are still not going anywhere fast but you just killed your ride quality
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
My bad, 215MBps (apples spec) on the newest models that have not shipped yet, 133MBs on the "old" ones that you can actually buy.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
They *are* indeed shipping, guy. I'm sitting in front of one now.
I'm getting tired of IDE garbage (let's face it, it's been suffering incremental now-it-sucks-less improvements for ten years). It's slow, buggy, and annoying. My question is, when will we see internal firewire drives?
Drives can be powered by the firewire bus, if necessarily (but why bother unless their usage is low, like zip drives), the cables are much easier to manage than ribbon cables and make getting around inside far easier (Apple has solved this in their G4 cases, but most haven't).
It's also 400 megabits (at the moment), is DMA (needs it for guaranteed bandwidth, for cameras and so on), inherantly needs no drivers, and so on. I've also seen PCI Firewire cards that have internal connectors (three external USB2, two external Firewire, and one each internal), so when will we start seeing the drives?
--Dan
The 733 G4 is a nice machine. The older ones had more cache and so processed more instructions per clock cycle (less waiting on slow memory) than later G4s. The old 733s were not passed for performance until the latest 933 and 1000 machines. I really like OS X and even 9.0.4, 9.1, and 8.1 so it is really aggrevating for me that Apple's hardware is so far behind state of the art. I get the feeling that it is not entirely their fault because they subcontract so many parts. Video from ATI and Nvidia, chips from IBM, Motorola, Toshiba, AMD, different drive vendors, assembled in Mexico, here, Malasia. The list goes on and on for a company that is basicly a software vendor and intellectual property holding company. Rambus doesn't make Rambus memory and Apple doesn't make Apples. If the vendors say they can only make PC600 Rdram and The Spec calls for PC800, it's back to the drawingboard or find a new manufacturer except the clock is running so you settle for the slower solution.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Under hardware competition from Power computing, The 8600/300 was a nice machine. You can stuff a Sonnet G4/450MHz into it to bring it up to speed but with a 50Mhz fsb and its use of 168pin fast page memory (now there is a great example of apple foisting off a dead end technology on their faithful users). Upgrade is not much of an option.
/.
The DivX 4.xx codec was originally Microsoft's but was extended by Intel for SSE. I know you will not claim Macs have SSE tucked inside the Velocity engine. DivX 4.11 allows the conversion of DVDs to MPEG 4 in real time. Meaning as you watch it, it's recording. You see, PC users are cheap bastards (or just not suckers) and are not willing to pay an extra 1000 bucks for a super drive to copy DVDs when they can do it for free.
The problem is, right now, 95% of the people ripping movies are using this fast codec. And DivX Networks, the makers of "the playa" and the codec, does not support Apple because of the aforementioned help they got from Intel. SO, Apple is ass out and must use the $1000 solution. And sure the drive is not $1000 but the machine that carries the drive starts at a price point $1000 higher than a PC capable of ripping DVDs in real time and burning said movies to CD a MUCH cheaper medium because it avoids the MPAA's tariff on DVDs.
As for picture quality, it's good enough that I cannot tell the difference between DVD and MPEG4 at 1600x1200 @ 32bit on my DP2040u 22 inch monitor, where I chose to spend the thousand dollars I saved by buying a PC instead of another Mac. What is the price point for 22" on the Apple side of the house? $2,499.00, more than an entire PC with a 22 inch monitor.
And for playback, because Apple cannot seem to understand the relevance of file extensions and thinks all MPEG4s are created equal, you can see the picture when you play back a DivX 4.11 MPEG4 but you cannot hear the sound.
Of course there is always iMovie. Not iMovie2 unfortunately. The original iMovie was a great application. It's a shame they had to change it. But like you said it doesn't matter because you are, luckily, abandoning the platform anyway and your current machine would take $344 to buy 256 megs of a dead end ram spec (256 megs of ram for PC costs about $80) and a $300 processor upgrade. $80 for an ATA/66 card and $100 for usb/firewire support. For $830 you can build yourself an extremely fast PC, comparable in performance to a G4 933.
Nice of you to come over from macslash. krevinek@mac.com I presume? You stated the same thing over there very nicely.
"Oi, should I mention again that MPEG-4 (the video codec) isn't MPEG-4 (the actual standard)? The MPEG-4 Apple is going to support is the MPEG-4 file format. What MPEG-4 compliant codecs will be available, we shall see (DivX, MPEG4v3 or whatever IS NOT MPEG-4). Sorry for the rant, just a little annoyed."
Osama is evil, evil is a state of mind, Osama lost his. So if he lost his mind, and evil is a state of mind, how can he be evil?
I'm sure your head is strained keeping your stories straight.
Oh, and welcome to
I've been trolled and lost an hour responding.. crap.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Ok, I concede. And added you to my friends list, which I guess makes me a fan of yours, well argued. I'm a hardware guy, as you may have guessed. I can see you are a programmer. Well, happy developing.. or.. something.. ;)
Games driving the market? Nearly 100%
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
you recall correctly which means it laste a little less than two years. It would have been nice if they had thought of a platform upgrade cycle without selling you an entirely new machine. The memory became obsolete, Almost forcing an upgrade for a platform that claims to have a 5 year life cycle. Even hated RDRAM has lasted longer than 2 years. SDRAM has lasted 4 and will make 6. DDR started just last year so who can say, except its adoption is so widespread and DDR platforms are planned into next year, It will have a longer life cycle too. Apple jumped on an interim solution that trapped their users without a clear upgrade path.
Much like the real topic, The latest iMac with no shot of getting a pci solution, stuck with a max hardrive size that will be obsolete in a year and not even made in two. Current ATA drives already exceed the firewire specs 50 Megabytes per second (400 Megabits) Meaning the new iMac is in an upgrade dead end before it even starts. Compare to the Original Bondi: Same max hardrive size and uses a memory spec that will continue to be used for at least 2 years. That is 6 solid years of platform life for the Bondi compared to the new iMac with 2 years of platform life and a flatscreen with maybe 2 years of life if used in a school enviroment (the iMacs traditional forte).
Not to mention they raised the Apple barrier to entry 500 dollars. They have certainly shown they know how to shoot themselves in the foot as far as hardware is concerned to the same level that Microsoft does on security, Linux does on usability, sun does on getting platform support, and IBM fails to capitalize on their intellectual property, Intel trips trying to keep up with AMD and AMD cannot market their superior products.
All companies drop the ball. The only difference is, with the image they are cultivating, and their position in the market (declining), they absolutly cannot afford to.
My objective is not to flame apple but to provide apple a wake up call. They have made mistakes but they have also had some AMAZING successes. I want to see them continue to make the ferraris of the computer world but ATA66, 100Mhz Front side buses and computers with no upgrade path without flat out buying new hardware ARE NOT FERRARIS
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Doesn't say anything about an internal FW port (as in the port is inside the computer, like ATA).
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
The spinward edge of the Western Digital Caviar WD1200BB (120GB capacity) has a sustained transfer rate of 49MB/s. It slows to About 29MB/s when reading near the hub. Two of these drives are far more than capable of saturating the ATA100 spec especially when you consider they have 8Mb of cache that allows them to burst (reading data prefetched from the drive) to fill the ATA100 bandwidth spec. The cache is much more usefull for writing small files because there is no chance of cache miss (having cached data that the OS never asks for).
Generally Platter size tends to be incremental. The WD1200BB has 40GB platters and it's predecessor had 30GB platters. The density difference was worth about 10MB/s at 7200rpm. 10000rpm at the same platter size will add about 10% and the 20% for the next platter size. I can guess that drives will hit 60+ MB/s by the end of this year. The rock bottom model will be 60Gb and the top end could be as high as 240Gb on a single drive.
This makes a great reason to finalize the ATA133 spec because Intel is not going to finish serial ATA anytime soon.
Sounds like we can have pure DVD disk images of every movie we rent on our desktops. Even now a Terrabyte of storage is within the grasp of power users. For under $2000. The cost of my first 2mb hardrive. For my apple 2. I can't wait to see what happens in the next twenty years.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Apple didn't "foist" off anything with that RAM. Apple was simply the first consumer manufacturer to go to the DIMM form factor, before SDRAM became widely used. At that point in time, it wasn't even certain what the next memory technology standard would be, so sticking with 5V FPM wasn't such a bad idea. By the time the PC cloners moved to DIMM memory, 3.3V SDRAM had become the standard.
And those DIMMs are pretty cheap on ebay these days. Even last year I was able to get a pair of 128M for $90 each. My old Power Tower Pro (and the Power Wave I found cheap recently) has eight sockets, for a total of 1 gigabyte max. The last time I checked, they were down to $50-$60 each on ebay.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
mkay...
Do you have any idea how absurd you sound?
$720 for a gig of crap ram? Your position is indefenceable.
check ebay Item:
# 2002994436
# 2002609802
# 2002659737
You are going to pay that much for crap ram on ebay, you might as well get a G4-400 with 512 mb of ram included.
The deapth of your ignorance astounds me.
pathetic troll.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
$30.00 for 128Mb 168pin EDO
:)
I kept looking because the best price I could find seemed so absurd. This somewhat discounts my rant at you -but- you were the one that paid $180 for $60 dollars worth of ram
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Absolute minimum price for system you describe:
$3,657.00
$1000 for final cut pro
$4,657 minimum now
And apple recomends you buy:
$2000 for after effects
$1000 for Commotion 4
$700 Hollywood FX
And their best system is 12 grand
plus 5 grand for software.
3.5 grand for Canon's XL1S
How much crack do you smoke?
I could make a cluster that would make the top 500 list for that much money.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
read apple spec online. end of discussion. COWARD
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.