Switch home System Back to Panther - ACARD Hardware Issue

After about a week of troubleshooting an SATA PCI Hardware RAID Controller on my QuickSilver G4, I switched my Mac back to Panther.

THE BEACH BALL OF DEATH:
With a ACARD SATA 6890M PCI RAID and two 250GB SATA Drives in either Mirror, Striped or Normal modes installed and during a long file copy (200MB - 2GB), Tiger and the SATA would hold up all applications. The copy would eventually finish and the system would return to normal, but the experience was painful holding up every 200MBs for about 30 seconds. Safari, Finder, and Photoshop would become non functional even while no CPU Activity was taking place. The Beach ball of Death! I tried 4 different Mac OS X Drivers for the SATA Controller and swapped all 16 possible combinations of the 4 PCI Slots. Removed old legacy Hardware, etc. Did 3 firmware updates to the SATA Controller. Still no dice. Man, I felt like I was troubleshooting a PC running Mac OS 9 (impossible, it's just an analogy). This type of troubleshooting will become more common when Mac's switch to Intel with more unsupported hardware options.

BLACK CAT SAVES THE DAY:
A friend of mine was having trouble installing Panther on his Graphite G4. I told him that I had an extra 80 GB ATA Drive, and I would give it to him with his Panther discs pre-installed. While I had his system running on my QuickSilver, I noticed better response time with my SATA Drives and less latency holdups! Only the Finder would experience some latency. All the other Apps would still function was they should on a BSD UNIX Based Multitasking/Multiprocessor system. Next, I installed a fresh copy of Panther on my own SATA RAID and updated to the latest ACARD 1.5.6 drivers, and WOW it worked even better. 1000 times better than with Tiger. I then tried a Fresh copy of Tiger on a separate partition and tried upgrading using the same 1.5.6 drivere The Latency came right back. And it didn't matter if I used the default Mac OS X Drivers or ACARD latest incarnation. Looks like the ACARD SATA PCI Card is not currently compatible with Tiger 10.4.3 on a QuickSilver Dual Ghz G4 with 1.5GB RAM.

THE BATTLE IS OVER, BUT THE SAGA CONTINUES:
Oh well, I am glad I got this hardware working and plus its bootable with Panther. (BTW, Tiger would never boot from the the SATA RAID, only PANTHER would boot correctly.)

I have a 500 GB Partition for my System, Apps, Music and some Video. I have another 300 GB Partition running on Apple's internal ATA. Both Partitions are stripped over 2 drives each; one via ACARD's SATA PCI Hardware, the other is Apple's Software RAID from the Motherboard's internal ATA. But the speed is awesome. Feels like I'm on a G5. It's nice having 800 GB of internal storage space.

The 16x DVDRW is working flawlessly too. Still burning lots of weekly podcasts with it for the morning commute.

Happy Holidays,

Goodtime