I've been following along with a few of these types of threads concerning booting / compatible PowerPC SATA (SIL-)controller cards. I came across this TSATA6-SSDPR-E2 from Sonnet and decided to test it in my Dual G5.
Without further ado – there is a way to make it work as a super-fast RAID0 boot device for Leopard (possibly Tiger; untested).
I used two WD BLUE 256GB SSDs but it shouldn't matter as Sonnet claims wide compatibility: SATA 6 Gb/s, SATA 3 Gb/s, and SATA 1.5 Gb/s. The PCI Express card shows up as an AHCI Standard Controller.
Prerequisites: you will need a linux machine with Gparted installed or equivalent competency with CLI tools. This can be the same machine. It will probably also work using target-disk mode or you can simply remove the RAID-slices from the PowerMac / Sonnet-Card after the install. I started this project by installing Debian 11 on a third SSD, attached to the internal SATA-Port of the G5. You must leave ~150MB FREE SPACE on a bootable, internal device. If your internal SATA disks are full with partitions, remove or resize one before you start.
Side notes: It seems the exact size of the OF-Booter partition is 128MB. I made mine 130MB. Installing Debian is extremely finicky on PPC64 at the moment, but not impossible. It's also not required. I can post about how to do this if people are having trouble scrounging the information from videos by @ActionRetro ; posts on the powerprogress site and Debian mailing lists.
1) Boot Leopard installer and use Disk Utility to set up your RAID. Mine is striped for maximum performance and I used a partition on each disk rather than the entire device.
Side notes: I left space to try the same thing with LVM/MDADM on Debian on the same machine, using the same Disks. My attempts using the latest Debian 11 kernel have failed. The SATA interface seems to crash, the kernel resets it – and I have been unable to get PPC64 GRUB2 to boot a software-RAID.
2) Install Leopard onto your RAID0 Set Volume
Really nothing special to mention here. Once it's done, it will not boot of course.
3) Boot into Linux – identify "SOURCE" OpenFirmware-RAID-Booter Partition
Mac OS X Disk Utility will not display the partition we are looking for. You can see it with "diskutil" as TYPE "Apple_Boot", NAME "Boot OSX". Using "lsblk -f" under linux will show it as FSTYPE "hfsplus" LABEL "Boot OSX".
Side notes: you might have noticed that there are two "Boot OSX" disks. The second one is for another RAID0 I had set up using the same disks. You can ignore this, just pick the first "Boot OSX" disk you can find on your fresh RAID0 disks – with Leopard installed on them. "Boot OSX" is created on all member-slices of a RAID set. Any one of them will do.
4) Create an "unformatted" Free Space "TARGET" partition
I wiped the swap partition from my Debian install. This gave me ~1GB to play with at the end of the internal SATA disk on the G5 mobo-bus.
I used GParted to create a new primary partition in the unallocated space with File system set to unformatted. I set the size to 130MB.
I now had a new blank partition /dev/sda4 to use as a target.
5) DD SOURCE TARGET
Simple block copy, takes about 20 seconds.
6) Refresh Devices in GParted and set "boot" Flag enabled
You will now see a new File System has shown up where the unformatted partition used to be.
Right-click --> Manage Flags and check "boot" flag is enabled for this partition.
7) That's it, you can now reboot
Use the ALT-down Open-Firmware-picker Boot-Combo and the RAID Set will show up as a bootable volume.
Benchmarks
Without further ado – there is a way to make it work as a super-fast RAID0 boot device for Leopard (possibly Tiger; untested).
I used two WD BLUE 256GB SSDs but it shouldn't matter as Sonnet claims wide compatibility: SATA 6 Gb/s, SATA 3 Gb/s, and SATA 1.5 Gb/s. The PCI Express card shows up as an AHCI Standard Controller.
Prerequisites: you will need a linux machine with Gparted installed or equivalent competency with CLI tools. This can be the same machine. It will probably also work using target-disk mode or you can simply remove the RAID-slices from the PowerMac / Sonnet-Card after the install. I started this project by installing Debian 11 on a third SSD, attached to the internal SATA-Port of the G5. You must leave ~150MB FREE SPACE on a bootable, internal device. If your internal SATA disks are full with partitions, remove or resize one before you start.
Side notes: It seems the exact size of the OF-Booter partition is 128MB. I made mine 130MB. Installing Debian is extremely finicky on PPC64 at the moment, but not impossible. It's also not required. I can post about how to do this if people are having trouble scrounging the information from videos by @ActionRetro ; posts on the powerprogress site and Debian mailing lists.
1) Boot Leopard installer and use Disk Utility to set up your RAID. Mine is striped for maximum performance and I used a partition on each disk rather than the entire device.
Side notes: I left space to try the same thing with LVM/MDADM on Debian on the same machine, using the same Disks. My attempts using the latest Debian 11 kernel have failed. The SATA interface seems to crash, the kernel resets it – and I have been unable to get PPC64 GRUB2 to boot a software-RAID.
2) Install Leopard onto your RAID0 Set Volume
Really nothing special to mention here. Once it's done, it will not boot of course.
3) Boot into Linux – identify "SOURCE" OpenFirmware-RAID-Booter Partition
Mac OS X Disk Utility will not display the partition we are looking for. You can see it with "diskutil" as TYPE "Apple_Boot", NAME "Boot OSX". Using "lsblk -f" under linux will show it as FSTYPE "hfsplus" LABEL "Boot OSX".
Bash:
lsblk -fSide notes: you might have noticed that there are two "Boot OSX" disks. The second one is for another RAID0 I had set up using the same disks. You can ignore this, just pick the first "Boot OSX" disk you can find on your fresh RAID0 disks – with Leopard installed on them. "Boot OSX" is created on all member-slices of a RAID set. Any one of them will do.
4) Create an "unformatted" Free Space "TARGET" partition
I wiped the swap partition from my Debian install. This gave me ~1GB to play with at the end of the internal SATA disk on the G5 mobo-bus.
I used GParted to create a new primary partition in the unallocated space with File system set to unformatted. I set the size to 130MB.
I now had a new blank partition /dev/sda4 to use as a target.
5) DD SOURCE TARGET
Simple block copy, takes about 20 seconds.
Bash:
dd if=/dev/sda2 of=/dev/sdb46) Refresh Devices in GParted and set "boot" Flag enabled
You will now see a new File System has shown up where the unformatted partition used to be.
Right-click --> Manage Flags and check "boot" flag is enabled for this partition.
7) That's it, you can now reboot
Use the ALT-down Open-Firmware-picker Boot-Combo and the RAID Set will show up as a bootable volume.
Benchmarks
