QS867 and Sonnet TSATA not playing nice

I finally had to upgrade to some larger drives in my trusty G4 so I decided that the best (read, least spendy) thing I could do is to drop in a PCI card adapter. The two SATA port Sonnet seemed like the best bet and it does work quite well. That is unless I want to shut the machine down. It just won't do it. The Finder quits and I get the bar segment circle and it just keeps on going round and round. I end up having to do a hard shut down. This happens 19 out of 20 times I go to shut 'er down. I should also add that putting the machine to sleep sometimes takes a long time. The monitor will go to sleep but the fan keeps on revving at normal speed. Last night it took 20 minutes before the machine finally went quiet. Other nights this week it went to sleep right away. I don't think it has anything to do with the fans spinning up to cool down the innards because if anything it's been cooler in my house this week than it has been for a long time. Also the machine will go quickly into quiet sleep even after I've been running it for hours doing 'Shop work.

I have Leopard installed on it and the machine would shut down just fine before adding in the SATA card. Now, not so much. I'm pretty much forced to keep Leopard as the OS due to one of my absolutely necessary applications only operating under Leopard and beyond that I really don't want to go backwards because I really like Leopard in general.

Any ideas as to what's going on here? I'll probably be bringing home a G5 soon anyway so it might be a moot point in a week or so but problems like this just bug me enough to want to find a solution if possible.

thanks
shawn

One question - are you using Seagate drives? If so do a Google. particularly macintouch, about problems shutting down Seagate drives with a Sonnet controller card.

Notice much improvement in speed with SATA? Lot of differing information about the supposed speed hump.

Well whaddya know...

The drive I installed at the same time as the card is a Seagate. Thanks for tipping me off on that tidbit of info. As far as speed goes, it does seem to be quicker on read/write operations but I've not done any testing to verify that assertion. It's basically an archive drive with no OS on it so I can't say if boot times are better or whatnot. I'll be adding the second drive soon so I might just play around and install Leopard on it and see what happens.

It looks like there is a 99% chance I will be bringing home a spare G5 (dual 2.0 GHz) from the office soon (fingers are crossed still, nothing is certain until the paperwork is approved) so I'm considering relegating the QS to being a media server or HTPC. It's still a great machine that lets me get work done so I'm far from letting it slide into oblivion and obsolescence. I'll do some googling around for the info you speak of. I knew there was a good reason I stumble in here every now and then.

shawn

Sonnet today have released new drivers for the controller cards. Hop on over and see if there is any joy retriever.

Now joy on the Sonnet front

However I would like a bit of confirmation of something I've seen more than once. Are the Sonnet cards basically the same as the SeriTek cards? SeriTek does have some new drivers updates on their site and while there is a physical resemblance between the two brands' cards I'm a little hesitant to run the SeriTek update if it's gonna screw up the works. I've got the G5 at home now so this isn't a whopper of an issue for me now but I'm like a dog with a frisbee when it comes to things like this. Thanks guys.

shawn

Suggest you do not as some sites report firmware troubles with the SeriTek however do a Google and look at xlr8yourmac.com reports on this problem. Would update Sonnet drivers and see how that goes.

Finally some definitive answers!

Alright, I finally remembered to drop a line to Sonnet's support team and I have to say I'm really impressed. I had a reply in under half an hour which really caught me out. I figured I wouldn't hear from them for a couple of days but hey, this works fine for me. Here's their reply:

Shawn,

This card is made for us by Firmtek so all the updates are at www.firmtek.com. Why they don't want us to mirror their downloads, I don't know.

Are you on a G4 machine by chance? If yes, you might want to actually downgrade your firmware to the last version. Apparently the 5.31 firmware they ship on the card will cause problems in older G4 machines. So they reposted 5.13 for those customers. Here's a link:

http://www.firmtek.com/download/SeriTek1S2_513.zip

Neal
Sonnet Customer Service
[email protected]

Well, I just ran through the procedure, which took all of seven minutes, and it looks like things are rather harmonious so far. The machine goes into sleep immediately upon command and shut downs are quick again. So it looks like any owners of Sonnet cards are fine using the Firmtek updaters, or rather downdaters(???) in my case. Consider this case closed as long as the sleep and shut down/restart stays consistently good. I just wanted to share my experiences with everyone. I can't be the only schlub who has ran into this issue. Thanks for the help here.

shawn

Great stuff shawn and I am sure your post will assist others. Bookmark it and keep it handy as sometime next week, next month or next year someone else will ask the same question.