Miglia Technology Limited, a UK company, has a new addition to its Alchemy range of PCI expansion cards: the Miglia Alchemy ATA100 PCI card for all PCI-based Macs.
Using the ATA 100 connectivity standard, the Alchemy ATA100 PCI card from Miglia guarantees 100MB/second bandwidth on each of the cards two channels, according to Miglia spokesperson Nick Peart. The Alchemy ATA100 PCI (IDE) card allows you to connect up to four hard drives, CD-ROMs, CD-RW or DVD drives.
It’s also compatible with PCI PowerMacs 4400 to 9600. This allows the users of these machines to add lower cost storage and with gain a 1,000 percent bandwidth increase over the standard built-in SCSI-2 interface, Peart said. On a PowerMac G3 the bandwidth increase will be between 300 percent and 625 percent depending on the number of channels utilized, he added.
What’s more, it’s possible to boot on a hard drive attached to the Alchemy card. This makes the Alchemy ATA100 card and a “relatively cheap IDE drive the perfect choice for users wanting to upgrade to Mac OS X at a cost effective price point,” Peart said. The Miglia Alchemy ATA100 card works with Mac OS 8.6 and up, including Mac OS X.
The Alchemy ATA100 PCI card doesn’t require additional drivers. Once installed, the Mac OS simply recognizes the card. It has a suggested retail price of US$149.
Miglia recently shipped a PCI enabled version of its PAL/NTSC analogue to digital video (and reverse) converter, Miglia Director’s Cut PCI. See our June 27 article for details.