ESATA Card for 1.8GHz Single CPU (Late 2004) Power Mac G5 Tower

Question

I have an unusual issue. I purchased the LaCie d2 quadra 500GB external hard drive. What attracted me to this drive is the ability to interface it by USB 2.0, Firewire 400, Firewire 800 or eSATA. Of course, eSATA looks like it would provide the best throughput. So, I asked the rep at MacMall to suggest a compatible eSATA card for my machine. He suggested LaCie part number 710372 which is a PCI card with two eSATA ports on it.
When it arrived, I checked the specs on the package and found that it requires a "PCI slot (32 bits 66Mhz; PCI 2.3 compliant interface)". When I checked Apple's web site it looks like my machine has the following caution "Warning: Do not use PCI cards that function only at 66 MHz in the 33 Mhz PCI slots. Damage to your equipment could result...". So, I called LaCie support to check this before I installed the card. LaCie support checked with their technicians and I was finally told that this card did have the ability to operate at 33 Mhz but it wasn't listed on the package.
So, I installed the card and then brought my machine up. It seemed to run normally. So, I attached the eSATA cable to the hard drive and then to one of the ports on the card. So far, so good. Then, I powered the drive up and it appeared on the desktop. I then fired up Disk Utility and erased the drive. That worked fine. Next, I tried to copy files to it and that worked.
As a matter of course, I always like to erase a new drive with the "write zeros to all sectors". This verifies that every sector on the drive can be written to without any problems. I don't know if this really accomplishes anything. But, it would seem to validate that the drive works fine.
So, I started this process knowing that it would take a long time for a drive this large (500 GB). This seemed to proceed normally as I checked it from time to time. But, after a number of hours (with only 13 minutes remaining), the entire system hung. I could not do anything except press the button on the front of the machine.
After the machine came back up, it seemed to run normally. But, as I started running applications, I could tell all was not well. The system hung from time to time. Each time, it took 10 or 15 minutes to become responsive.
Finally, I got disgusted and powered everything down and removed the suspect PCI card. Since I did that, the machine works fine.
The drive is now connected using the Firewire 800 cable and seems to work fine. But, it doesn't seem especially fast. I have other drives attached using Firewire 400. Is it possible to have drives attached to both Firewire busses and still get the performance advertised by Firewire 800?
Also, is there an eSATA card that will work in my machine and still provide the advertised eSATA performance (1.5Gbits per second/150MB/second)?
With the drive connected to the Firewire 800 port, it honestly doesn't seem any faster than any of the other Firewire 400 drives.

Answer 1

I didn't say what to do, only options and tried to point out WHY.
This is what I know, these are possible explanations. And alternatives.
most PCI cards are NOT a fixed 66MHz, very very small market. And most PCI slots are not 66MHz only. The Blue G3 and Xserve have used 66MHz PCI.
Your card should work. eSATA is slightly better than FW800. But you are going through a 'bridge' between the drive and the PCI card, usually Oxford 924 chipset.
A direct SATA case for $68 would let you use two drives and get the 75MB/sec writing speed, which is about as much as you can expect from most SATA drives and in G5 anyway.
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MESATATBEK/
And here is a nice 500GB drive for $99
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Maxtor/7H500F0/
Connect it to one of the eSATA ports on your LaCie SATA PCI card.
And yes, you have the single drive now.
When installing cards and drives, reset-nvram - either zap the pram from cold startup or boot into Open Firmware and type the reset-nvram and reset-all from there.
I know lots of people use and are happy with LaCie and D2. I am not one of them (I use to buy LaCie when it was Quantum back in early 90s).