OK, I was at a garage sale today, came across an ATA/133 PCI card, for $1, which in any language is a steal, so I got it and a PCI SCSI card for my B&W. I get home, install both cards, hook my primary 120gb seagate 7200RPM ATA/100 HD to the primary channel of the card, and a IBM deskstar 13.6gb 7200RPM to the secondary channel. I then hook in the original 10gb Maxtor on the internal bus. When I boot it up, off an OS X CD (so I can set the drive to boot), It can not see the drives, but it can see the card in the PCI cards section of system profiler. Unfortunantly, it says the S.M.A.R.T. stats on the 10gb failed, so it refuses to format it so I can install a quick bit of OS X to see if I can get the drives to show up for work.
My next step is to boot into Ubuntu to see if it sees the drives and the card (and can recognise the card by an actual name, not a vendor code).
stats of the card:
Scilicon Image SD-SIL680-RAID ATA/133 and RAId PCI card
a quick google search turns up no info on hooking it to a mac.
so, does anyone have any ideas on how to get this thing recognised? I guess I could hook the 120gb to the internal bus, boot off of that, and see what it comes up with.
-digital 
If the cards are not intended for use in a Mac, chances are near nil you'll get them working.
Otherwise we'd all be doing it, and not paying $70 for a card that sells on the PC-side for $20
I booted off Ubuntu 7.04 live CD, and it DID recognise the card, and even mounted the 120gb. However, the 13.6gb IBM drive is showing up as an almost 240gb drive.
I guess the ubuntu CD is using some PC ported and/or generic driver.
my next step is to create a small bootable partition (preferably with yaboot), that loads that specific driver, then displays a menu of my OS choices.
I know, it sounds complex, but It is looking to be possible. Essentailly, I may have to write a small linux distro that does what I need it to do.
-digital
You may need to flash the card for Mac ROMs (if that's even possible) and I seem to recall you have to format the drives on the card in OS X for OS X to recognise them. The card presents them to the Mac OS as SCSI drives.
yes, thats how they were showing up in ubuntu, as SCSI drives. The one drive does have OS X on it. I am going to try booting from the OS X disk in the built in ATA, see if it recognises the card, If it does, I will attempt to find some mac firmware and flash it. If not, then I will live with the 120gb in the ATA33 slot. It really is not that slow, but I thought the card would speed everything up.
-digital
ATA controller cards for the PCI Macs are pretty limited--Sonnet, Acard,...um, I can't remember the other one or two. I've never heard of anyone flashing PC ATA cards' ROMs to Mac, and never seen any site addressing the idea at all. This thread may be of much interest to you:
http://www.applefritter.com/node/20469
It seems there's not much gain at all between any of the cards when installed in a B&W, according to the contributors to that thread, but I never got a genuine sense of an ultimate consensus on the topic.
Anyway, you've proven the card works, so on your auction you can say it does. I don't think the 133 PC cards are worth too much anymore, though.
I'm not aware of any SIL680-based cards for Mac, so I doubt if there's any kind of driver or firmware out there. I've got one of these in my P4 wintel box, works nice, but it was cheap as heck when I bought it new and I can't imagine they sell for much used. I'd suggest just keep it around in case you somehow ever need an ATA adapter for a wintel.
dan k
thing is worthless when installing windows XP on them. 2k you can do, but XP keeps Kernel panicking when trying to boot from the card.
Is this the RAID model? or is this just dual-channel IDE?
it's the RAID version. I may just keep it around.
I had to take it and the SCSI card i bought out, since otherwise the spinning circle would not stop spinning and finsh booting. i'll put the IDE card in to see if it recognises it post boot, because if it does, I can at least use it to install ubuntu on the IBM and reboot into ubuntu. Who knows? I may luck out.
-digital