need a new sonnet duel 1.8 processor

Hi there,
I just bought OSX TIGER ,a graphics card from e-bay (9800) and a new dvd burner ( pioneer 111d) all I need now is the processor upgrade (sonnet duel 1.8) ..does anyone know a cheap Uk SITE for this processor ?
I found it for £369.00 + vat (£433.57 at www.macupgrades.co.uk

Thanks again for all your help. David.

I am doing the exact same mod to my 667Mhz Digital Audio. I have the Radeon 9800 Pro which I got on Ebay. Just need one more stick of RAM and the Sonnet Dual 1.8. Here in the USA the cheepest I have found it is $599. Am trying to find it a bit cheeper. Lil here on Mac Forums lives in the UK and might know where to find one at a better price for you. Good luck with your upgrade. I am going IDE Raid also.

Geesh, for that price you can pick up a used g5 that'll smoke the doors off of any g4.

Yes, by the time you have upgraded it, you can have a dual G5 for not a lot more if you want a dual processor. The single processor 1.6/1.8GHz PMac G5s would be in reach though.

However the PowerMac G4 Graphite hyas a wonderful aesthetic :flower: And it is super reliable hardware (not that the PowerMac G5 isn't)

In fact my Dual 1.8 G4 runs apparently according to XBench at 65% the speed of a dual 2.0GHz G5—not too bad all things considering, and that is plenty fast enough for what I have.

Plus the G5 does not have the built in hardware RAID support, and not all have Airport Extreme so on par, I have spent as much as I would have done on my G4 system as I would have done on a s/hand Dual 1.8 G5—but bear in mind in the H4s price I am including a second Dell 2001FP display I purchased (20" 4:3 1600x1200)

Now prices on upgrades, not wishing to let down my image, I found a cracking place to get Dual 1.6 and 1.8GHz upgrades that is in the USA, but has great prices that may just edge out the UK's price after customs even!

Single processor 7447A 1.8GHz: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/NEW-Giga-Desi...ryZ80031QQssPageNameZWD2VQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Same seller but their website price for Dual 1.8GHz: http://store.gmstechkc.com/dual_18.html

$479 + shipping.

Made by Gigadesigns, just as respected as Sonnet and based on the same 7447A that Sonnet uses.

Sadly the 7455/7 really tops out at 1.5GHz as it wasn't developed as much as the L3 cache iterfaceless 7445/7 series.

That said, I found the Sonnet Encore ST 1.4GHz w/7457 (256KB 1:1 L2/2MB 1:1 L3) as fast as a 7447A at 1.8GHz (512KB 1:1 L2, no L3).

Hope this helps.

The IDE RAID is what apart from the processor upgrade that really kicks these machines into flying motion!

Vicky

Thanks Lil for that last price. $599 is a bit much and I was looking for cheaper. Lowest I had found on a Giga Dulie was $499. After that I will get the Raid card. I have 2 Seagate 120GB 7200 RPM 8Meg Cache drives waiting for it! :spook:

Hi there,
I just read all the replies .... thanks for the input. In regard to the ( could have got a G5) Alas I have a Motu 2408 mk2 sound card with a
pci 323 and Its not compatible with the G5 and that was £800 and all together would be setting mr back too much money and time .... I need to make music really soon. Thanks again for the input though. Plus ...having to by all new ram again. I love my machine. It looked so sad whn I searched for a G5 neye:


ps: Vicky , I will need to upgrade my hard drive soon so will you explain the raid business when you have a moment spare. You're a star. David .

Also another plus point for the G4 rightly pointed out...

Anyway, RAID.

I run my RAID array in mode 0—this is called striped RAID.

There is another mode, mode 1 RAID which is called mirroring which I will discuss in the latter part of this reply.

RAID 0 uses two drives connected to the RAID card as master (or slave) to pair the two drives to make it appear as one drive. Anything written to the drive is replicated on both drives, so you end up with two identical copies. This happens for both RAID 0 (striping) and 1 (mirroring). This is where the function splits.

Striped RAIDs use the two drives to increase the speed of access to/from the drive in terms of read and write activity. Even though the Parallel ATA specification can support up to 133MB/s (ATA133) thoretically and Serial ATA 150 150MB/s (SATA 300 - 300MB/s)—this speed is very rarely if ever acheived. As we have moved to SATA, it has been proven its not a limitation of the interface itself (ie: parallel ATA being dysfunctional).

Hard drives now come regularly with large cache sizes (8 or 16MB for decent drives) so the cacheing is pretty deep.

Also, IDE drives in 3.5" format are easily available in 7200RPM speeds and even 10,000RPM now meaning SCSI (another bus standard like IDE but better) isn't a necessity. So the spin speed isn't limiting the transfer rate greatly either (the biggest jump is noticed in 4,200RPM to 5,400RPM, any more seems to begin to loose its edge).

The problem is therefore the actual way in which the hard disk reads information, it's just not fast enough to sustain fast R/W. This is where RAID 0 (or striping) comes in.

Striping effectively doubles sustainably read and write operations to the 'hard disk' (even though there are physically two, the RAID card masquerades it as one drive remember). What it does is the Mac sends to the RAID controller either a request for some information (a read operation) or sends some information (a write operation). The RAID controller then asks drive 1 to read/write a certain segment of the required operation and then asks drive 2 to read/write the remaining segment of the required operation.

If it is writing, the RAID card tells memory via a DMA (Direct Memory Access) controller to start throwing more down the bus quicker than a non RAID controller, as it is able to speed up the write operation by writing the file (simplistically speaking) in two parts, one part per drive, meaning the operation is completed typically in half the time of a single drive. The single drive in a non RAID situation would be slower telling the DMA controller to continue sending information down the bus as it cannot cope with as much.

A similar scenario happens with read operations. The Mac sends the signal for the read operation from backing store (the hard disk drive/raid controller in this instance) into main memory, the RAID controller receives the read instruction and then asks the first drive to read a certain segment of the required data and the second drive the remaining segment. Once this happens the RAID controller then starts pumping via the DMA controller the data from the read operation into main memory faster, utilising much of the wasted bandwidth.

Technically speaking, an ATA133 controller alone in a Digital Audio G4 or any G4 for this matter would be wasted as the ATA66 (ATA100 in Mirror Drive Door) bus is plenty fast enough to sustain high speed transfer rates (of what is physically possible) to a single drive.

An ATA 133 RAID controller provides a speed up not because it is ATA133 vs. ATA66, but rather Non-RAID vs. RAID.

Why do you reckon video pros demand RAID storage? It is so quick! That's when you start wandering away from cheap IDE devices into SCSI and better still SCSI connected via fibre channel. Seriously fast.

RAID Striping has a drawback though. If one drive fails, the data is lost on both drives. However this is the same for a single drive system where if it fails, the infoirmation is lost. In this sense RAID 0 is no more secure backup wise than a non-RAID system.

RAID 1 or mirroring does not give the speed boost of striping but writes to both drives concurrently meaning that if one drive fails, one still has the data, and dropping in a replacement drive would restore the contents from the surviving drive to the new one and operation would continue as usual.

Inb summary:

RAID 0 (Striping)—For those who need speed.
RAID 1 (Mirroring)—For those who want transparent backup (though no failure proof) backup.

HTH :flower:

Vicky

Not to be contradictory lil, but a quuick Google search on RAID provided multiple hits that disagree with your definition of RAID 0. For example:

Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.

That is from HERE but there are many more that read pretty much the same. Are you talking about RAID 0 with fault tolerance, if such a thing exists?

Another example is HERE

I dont understand what RAID setup is not supported on a bone-stock G5 powermac. I personally have run a bootable striped RAID and a mirrored RAID on a single proc G5 1.8. The G4 is a great machine but having personally owned a digital audio g4,MDD powermac g4 1.25ghz, 1 quicksilver g4 w/ sonnet encore 1.4 (2mb l3 cache) and a powermac g5 1.8 (single), I can honestly say that the G5 is a much, much better machine. The case is better designed (both aesthetically as well as functionally), faster processor,faster system bus, faster ram, faster video bus, better graphics cards available, faster hard disk interface, better cooling sub-system,optical audio outputs, usb 2.0 standard...shall I go on? I loved my G4's too until i stepped up to the G5. I have now stepped up to the iMac core duo (see signature) and am convinced this is the fasted computer I've ever owned as well as the most productive.

baggss said:

Not to be contradictory lil, but a quuick Google search on RAID provided multiple hits that disagree with your definition of RAID 0. For example:

Level 0 -- Striped Disk Array without Fault Tolerance: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disk drives) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. If one drive fails then all data in the array is lost.

That is from HERE but there are many more that read pretty much the same. Are you talking about RAID 0 with fault tolerance, if such a thing exists?

Another example is HERE

Click to expand...

I quote from my post:

"RAID Striping has a drawback though. If one drive fails, the data is lost on both drives. However this is the same for a single drive system where if it fails, the infoirmation is lost. In this sense RAID 0 is no more secure backup wise than a non-RAID system."

Yes there is RAID striping with fault tollerance that uses a third drive to mirror the striped drives but that takes a performance hit and is not supported on the current range of ATA IDE cards and is unlikely to be supported as far as I am aware.

Vicky

Texasmeat said:

I dont understand what RAID setup is not supported on a bone-stock G5 powermac. I personally have run a bootable striped RAID and a mirrored RAID on a single proc G5 1.8.

Click to expand...

Are you running a software or hardware RAID, the PowerMac G5 does not have a built in SATA RAID controller, it does however like all Jaguar and later Macs contain support for software RAIDs managed by Mac OS X.

Texasmeat said:

The G4 is a great machine but having personally owned a digital audio g4,MDD powermac g4 1.25ghz, 1 quicksilver g4 w/ sonnet encore 1.4 (2mb l3 cache) and a powermac g5 1.8 (single), I can honestly say that the G5 is a much, much better machine. The case is better designed (both aesthetically as well as functionally),

Click to expand...

I'd say that is a subjective thing rather than objective, as my opinion is that the G4 is an easier machine to maintain with its flip down panel, and for my tastes the Graphite G4 looks better than the PMac G5, but that's my own personal opinion, as I don't particularly like the PowerMac G5s look, but that's me :flower:

Texasmeat said:

faster processor,faster system bus, faster ram, faster video bus, better graphics cards available, faster hard disk interface, better cooling sub-system,optical audio outputs, usb 2.0 standard...shall I go on?

Click to expand...

I won't dispute that out of the box it comes a lot better specified than a 2001 era PowerMac G4. But the fact I don't like the PowerMac G5's looks, plus it being a bit too big for the small confined space I have made it more or less a no go. That's not me saying the G5 is a bad machine, it's a great machine, a fantastic machine.

We all just have our personal tastes and well, frankly, we all chose what we have for our own reasons and until that person's own mind changes—then they should at least stay very happy with the decision they made.

Oh and I use a lot of Mac OS 9 stuff, and having OS 9 bootability is a big bonus, had an iSub and Apple Pro Speakers laying around and wanted to make use of them without the addition of Griffin's dongle...

The point I am getting at is that what is best for one person necessarily isn't the best for someone else. There are faster AMD PC systems than Macs, but does that make them a better choice? :flower:

Texasmeat said:

I loved my G4's too until i stepped up to the G5. I have now stepped up to the iMac core duo (see signature) and am convinced this is the fasted computer I've ever owned as well as the most productive.

Click to expand...

Maybe it's a sign of age, belligerence, delusion, or some **** other thing but for what I do and that is use Corel Painter IX.5, Adobe Creative Suite 2 day in and day out, I find my PowerMac G4 is all that I need, and handles everything I want to do fantastically—just as you find your PowerMac G5 and iMac Core Duo work fantasically for your needs.

The bottom line is, I'm more than happy with what I have, you are more than happy with what you have, and least we have both chosen to use machines with the best OS on the planet

Vicky

lil said:

I quote from my post:

"RAID Striping has a drawback though. If one drive fails, the data is lost on both drives. However this is the same for a single drive system where if it fails, the infoirmation is lost. In this sense RAID 0 is no more secure backup wise than a non-RAID system."

Yes there is RAID striping with fault tollerance that uses a third drive to mirror the striped drives but that takes a performance hit and is not supported on the current range of ATA IDE cards and is unlikely to be supported as far as I am aware.

Vicky

Click to expand...

Actually, I was only talking about this paragraph and probably should have said so in my last post, sorry for not doing so:

RAID 0 uses two drives connected to the RAID card as master (or slave) to pair the two drives to make it appear as one drive. Anything written to the drive is replicated on both drives, so you end up with two identical copies. This happens for both RAID 0 (striping) and 1 (mirroring). This is where the function splits.

I've found nothing about the part in bold for RIAD 0. Everything else was correct for 0 and 1.

Ahh.. my silly mistake there. Not sure why I typed that, yes only RAID 1 makes two copies, RAID 0 splits the blocks that make up the files over the two drives, so only RAID 1 makes two identical copies, one on each drive.

Goodness knows what I was thinking to write the paragraph you pointed out, just guess I was tired!

(just got in from work and flaked out on the couch for an hour, so very tired this week!)

Well spotted and dunce hat donned :flower:

Vicky