Sonnet Technologies THD-M Tempo ATA 100/133 Drive Controller Card for Macintosh (No Hard Drive)

Rating:
Summary: Neat card!
Review: First off, the Sonnet Tempo HD (THD) is different than the picture. It's actually a card with a single PATA channel for 2 regular IDE drives, and a laptop-style ATA connector with space for a 2.5" HDD to mount directly on the card. If you have a laptop HDD lying around from an upgrade or a deceased machine, this is a good card to consider. It's vaguely reminiscent of the "HardCards" of PCs past - those were RLL adapters with 3.5" drives mounted to them.

The card itself is a nice shade of purple, great for those of you wanting to put this in a PC with a window case, and offers another hard drive for space-strapped rack cases, which is where mine went. It's built on a Promise controller, which has been rock-solid of late, not like the bad old days of ISA slots. No idea if the device offers RAID, but that's not really a concern. The object is more storage, not fancy ways of storing things.

Interestingly enough, there are two versions listed for this card. One for Windows, and one for Mac. I purchased mine from a "Mac" dedicated store, and put it in a Windows machine. No driver disk was included, but the generic Promise driver downloaded from Sonnet's website had the card up and running in a matter of minutes. It plays well with the Silicon Image ATA controller in the slot beside it, and has offered nothing but quiet reliability since it was installed.

Installation was standard, just stick it in a free PCI slot, turn on the machine and let Windows ask for the drivers. Installed, formatted the attached drive with NTFS - It didn't like FAT32 for some reason - and away it went. No problems to speak of, and it's as fast as it's going to get using a 4200RPM drive.

The card is a bit pricey compared to other ATA adapters, which can usually be had for $50 retail, or less online. But, if you need more storage and don't have any free bays, this is the way to go.


Rating:
Summary: Not as easy as it could have been
Review: I got the card for my G4 733mhz powermac at home. I am in the process of upgrading the mac and this was gonna be the first step and the cheapest step in trying to speed my mac up.

The box that card came in was nice. But the card did NOT come with any cables, and the cable that was in my powermac was too short to work with the card. Luckily I am a bit of a computer geek and had a couple of extra cables lying around. The manual that came with the card was xerox copies and had 1 staple on the top corner. Not very encouraging, but if they did that to keep the price of the product down i am cool with it.

I had issues installing the card and the drives. First time i booted up it didnt see the drives. second time it didnt see the drives also but when i booted using the cd and ran disk utility my drives were there. turns out i had the cable going from Slave to Master to Card when it should have been Master to Slave to Card. Finally I got things working.

I was expecting the new card to speed my boottime but its actually taking longer now. I have my boot drive connected to the card and its taking around 10 or more seconds for it to start booting now. I guess it spends the 10 secs looking for a drives new location. First boot it took atleast 20 secs of just the dark grey apple boot screen with no movement at all.

Do I regret getting this? Not really. I already have 1GB of RAM and the only other speed upgrade options I had were the ATA 133 card and processor upgrade. This was cheaper and I guess it did speed my mac up a bit when launching programs and browsing images from photoshop. I wont give it a 5 cuz it lacked cables.