In my SE/30, I am currently using an R-IDSC-E SCSI to IDE converter purchased off ebay, which is still for sale for ~$35.

http://cgi.ebay.com/IDE-40pin-to-SCSI-50pin-Bridge-Adapter-Amiga-MAC-PC-NEW_W0QQitemZ280448840241QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item414c0db231#ht_500wt_991

I'm also using an IDE-CF adapter available on ebay for ~$5.

http://cgi.ebay.com/IDE-to-CF-Compact-Flash-Hard-Drive-w-Rear-Panel-USA-sh_W0QQitemZ390141108008QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item5ad638df28#ht_1939wt_751

The mounting plate unscrews, and I just have the bare card plugged directly into the r-idsc-e scsi-ide converter, no extra cables.

I'm currently using a $20 Kingston 133x 8GB CF card from buy.com, which works fine for my purposes, but I would recommend something higher end for your requirements. As for speed, I have no benchmarks and you've provided no benchmarks to compare against your drive so I can't help in that department.

LEM has some benchmarks: http://lowendmac.com/benchmarks/se30.shtml

And according to the wikipedia article on CF speeds, almost any CF card you buy today will be able to max out the SE/30's SCSI bus. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompactFlash The higher end cards will be more likely to sustain those speeds without the wear leveling causing stalls. Since CF is parallel IDE, the IDE-CF adapter is straight through connections and won't slow performance. The R-IDSC-E adapter seems to be able to max out SCSI-2 speeds, so I don't think that'll be an issue either.

However, mounting it is the downfall with this approach IMO. The R-IDSC-E SCSI-IDE converter is a bare board, as is the IDE-CF adapter which makes mounting in a metal case awkward. I kind of hacked it together with a plastic 3.5" drive sled from a 6200, and mounted that into the SE/30. I wouldn't recommend doing what I did, so unfortunately you're on your own here.

Do you think that this will work?

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Should do, yes.

this:http://cgi.ebay.com/4GB-Disk-On-Module-40Pins-Industrial-MLC-IDE-Flash_W0QQitemZ220395738789QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item33509c16a5#ht_2750wt_1010

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That's much cheaper than I was expecting! Even a 4GB Compact Flash would cost that or more, wouldn't it?

You can get a 4 gig CF card for less than $15, or less than $20 for a fast one or a good brand. On the other hand, $27 is pretty good, especially considering the fact that you don't need the CF to IDE adapter.

I just thought I'd mention that other than using CF cards as boot devices, I'm using several as the main drives in HP Jornada computers which are running NetBSD. The most active of them has been running as a slave DNS server for about 500 domains and as a router for a subnet of public IPs. The first card I got for that machine died after about six months, but I realized that was because I was using filesystem journaling which writes the same small areas of the disk over and over and over, very frequently. When I got the replacement card, I turned off journaling, and it's been running without the slightest complaint for a year now.

I have a feeling that the above eBay item or any decent CF card these days will last just about forever in an SE/30.

Yeah, I tend to agree.

Re prices: It's been a while since I checked, and I forget how quickly computer related stuff gets cheaper.

I suppose the SCSI bus is hindered by age, and by a dog-slow system bus.

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Very much so.
These are not SE/30s and not SCSI but you get the idea.

http://poopr.org/images/smzhjze54hlu6ms6b9a.png

Current system (Beige G3 433MHz) - was using a Kingston Elite Pro or something 4GB 133x CF card

The Quadra 630 is just the default comparison result that I forgot to remove before taking the screenie. It would be using whatever HDD it came with I guess. It is not mine.

6500/225 4GB 133x CF - was using the 4GB CF

6500/225 64mb r7000 - was using a 6GB Western Digital Caviar from a rev D tray loading iMac.

P580/40 ST15150N - was using a Seagate ST15150N on the SCSI bus

Beige G3 433 rad7000 - was using the 6GB WDC

Performa 580 33MHz & 40MHz - were using the 6GB WDC

The Performa 580 and PowerMac 6500 were both running Mac OS 7.6.1. The Beige G3 was running Mac OS 9.2.2.

It would have helped if I had set each one up specifically for benching. New OS install, fresh boot, as similar of settings as possible, etc. These results are just what I have ended up collecting over time. Not professional at all. :S

Either way, I can certainly say that a 133x CF card will not result in an easily noticeable difference to most people on 68k IDE. I am not entirely sure about 68k SCSI though since I have no SCSI->IDE devices to compare. Still, unless you are using a decent PowerMac, a CF card will not hamper you much.

...unless you are using a decent PowerMac, a CF card will not hamper you much.

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I don't want to be hampered at all. Indeed, I want a speed boost for reads and writes.

Yet, with all this talk of what's possible, why then is there no one among us with comparative benchmarks?

I want to see benchmark performance of a CF or SSD solution in an SE/30, and then compare that with a fast spinning platter hard drive. Only then can we decided, based on the facts, what is truly faster or better.

The difference, if measurable, between CF and SATA on a polled I/O SCSI bus on a 16 MHz m68030 is going to be so insignificant as to be noise. Any CF (except perhaps the slowest, oldest) and any SATA or IDE drive these days will easily be able to sustain 2 MB/sec, which is the maximum you could ever get from an SE/30 SCSI.

If you can measure a difference, it might be on seek times, although I highly doubt that a 2.5" laptop hard drive's seek time is large enough to measure.

I'll stick a CF into my Quadra 605 and compare it with the current SCSI-SATA interface and see if there's any difference, although I don't think that even an '040 will be fast enough to measure the difference.

The difference, if measurable, between CF and SATA on a polled I/O SCSI bus on a 16 MHz m68030 is going to be so insignificant as to be noise.

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Pure speculation until I see actual benchmarks. Benchmarks are very easy too. Most of us have a copy of Norton Utilities, which includes a benchmarking program. There were also other popular benchmarking apps for 68k Macs.

If I had a flash disk solution in my hands right now, I would do the benchmark comparisons and post them for all of us. But I don't have that so I appeal to those of you who do. Cut the speculation and put down some facts. Benchmark numbers speak louder that our "guesses."

I can't speak for the others, but I was just trying to share my experiences from using CF in an SE/30 (and other machines) and relevant information on the subject in order to help you with your decision. Personally, I've already made my decisions and have a setup I'm pleased with. I, and I think most of the other posters here, were simply trying to help you achieve the same. Ultimately, it is your decision and what you decide really does not impact the rest of us.

I personally have no need or desire to spend time tracking down benchmarking software, benchmarking my systems, tearing them down, and re-benchmarking in various configurations in order to justify the decisions I made about my setup.

However, since you've been so appreciative of the experiences and advice given so far, and have asked nicely for others to benchmark their systems so you can make a more informed decision, I'm willing to do so.

I do not have a version of Norton Utilities with a disk benchmarking utility, and the TimeDisk utility used in the LEM SE/30 benchmark does not seem to be available. I've also been unsuccessful in locating a working copy of MacBench for the SE/30.

If you would kindly provide the benchmarking tool you would like us to use, and the tests you would like us to run, I'll make an effort to provide you with the requested information.

I know that MacBench 1 will run on the SE/30. I am not sure about version 2(though it does have results for a SE.. so I bet it does) but I have both around. They are also available somewhere online as well.

As far as I know I have no other 68k benching tools that can do HDDs.

The difference, if measurable, between CF and SATA on a polled I/O SCSI bus on a 16 MHz m68030 is going to be so insignificant as to be noise.

Click to expand...

Pure speculation until I see actual benchmarks. Benchmarks are very easy too. Most of us have a copy of Norton Utilities, which includes a benchmarking program. There were also other popular benchmarking apps for 68k Macs.

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No, not pure speculation - it's observation, although not observation specific to the SE/30. Take, for instance, the Amiga 3000. For quite a while it had the fastest SCSI bus of any non-Unix workstation and was used to benchmark drives. It's much faster than the SE/30's SCSI bus because it supports real DMA, has a FIFO to allow for 32 bit bus transfers and can even be persuaded to do synchronous mode. When I compared an 80 gig 7200 RPM 3.5" IDE drive on a SCSI to IDE adapter with a 250 gig 5400 RPM 2.5" SATA drive in an Acard SATA to SCSI adapter, there was no measurable difference. There was more of a variability between individual tests than there was between the different drives.

I'll let you know how things go when I compare the CF card with the SCSI-SATA.

I have benchmarked a couple of storage solutions I had lying around, including:

Seagate Cheetah 10k RPM ST9102LW

SanDisk UltraII 4GB CompactFlash

Quantum ProDrive LPS connected externally

Kingston 8GB Standard CompactFlash (no manufacturer speed rating)

I had difficulty formatting a chart correctly in this post, so results are available at: http://synack.net/~bbraun/se30disks/

JDW indicated a preference for the Norton Utilities benchmark, so I used System Info from 4.0.3.

When interpreting the results, please read the notes I wrote at the bottom. There seemed to be pretty high variability in the results between multiple runs in the same configuration.

Sadly, I do not have any UDMA capable CF cards as that would provide an interesting comparison. As it stands, the low end CF card, which does not seem to have a speed rating from the manufacturer, performs the poorest. The UltraII card, which is pretty middle of the road, running in PIO mode, does as well as the 10k RPM Cheetah drive within the variability of the benchmark.

bbraun, I certainly appreciate your time in testing CF solutions versus spinning platter drives with Norton "System Info."

It is interesting to see from your results that even the rather speedy SanDisk Ultra II did not beat the Cheetah in any of the tests except Random Read, and even then it wasn't an enormous difference. Overall the SanDisk Ultra II was a few points slower than the spinning platter drive (albeit a fast one).

The low end 8GB card you tested scored less than half of the SanDisk and Cheetah, although it did marginally better on the Random Read test. But clearly, that 8GB flash is a choice none of us would prefer in terms of performance.

It is interesting to note that the SanDisk Ultra II CF card is rated at 15MB/sec speeds for both READ and WRITE. You would think that should saturate the rather slow SCSI bus on the SE/30.

I wish to point out that while this test was only conducted on two different flash cards, it does confirm what I personally felt prior to the test. Namely, that given the specifications of the flash card, one would naturally think that the SanDisk Ultra II 4GB CF should saturate the SCSI bus of the SE/30 and be the winner over spinning platter drives in every test. But the fact that a spinning platter drive, the Cheetah, was in fact marginally faster than the SanDisk and winning all the drive tests except one, indicates that we cannot simply look at the flash card specifications alone. Benchmarks really do help us determine the performance of CF solutions for our vintage Macs.

Further benchmarks performed on spinning platter drives are available for viewing from this LEM SE/30 Page.

If you want to run your own tests but lack the software (or the knowledge where to download it freely), just PM me.

Thanks again, bbraun.

It is interesting to see from your results that even the rather speedy SanDisk Ultra II did not beat the Cheetah in any of the tests except Random Read, and even then it wasn't an enormous difference. Overall the SanDisk Ultra II was a few points slower than the spinning platter drive (albeit a fast one).

Click to expand...

I disagree with your interpretation of the benchmark results here. These are single data points with an observed variability of up to 12%. There is not sufficient data to be drawing the conclusions you are with any confidence at all. I'd really rather not dust off my old statistics book and do a proper work up on these benchmarks. That'd eat up the better part of a weekend to do properly.

It is interesting to note that the SanDisk Ultra II CF card is rated at 15MB/sec speeds for both READ and WRITE. You would think that should saturate the rather slow SCSI bus on the SE/30.

Click to expand...

It is not entirely clear to me that both the Cheetah and UltraII card, and in some tests even the Quantum drive, aren't maxing out the machine. I lack sufficient knowledge of the system and protocol to make an educated guess in this area. There may be other bottle necks than the SCSI bus and the device. Clearly both are capable of much higher speed transfers. The standard for the protocol would indicate a 5MB/s bus, and both devices can exceed that in faster systems, yet we don't see anything close to that in these results. Clearly smaller transfers require a higher overhead of both bus throughput and CPU processing. Again, I do not believe there is sufficient data to support the conclusions you are drawing.

Further benchmarks performed on spinning platter drives are available for viewing from this LEM SE/30 Page.

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After preparing these benchmarks, I am skeptical. For one thing, the article makes the assertion the SE/30 SCSI bus maximum is 4Mbps, yet provide data that it is operating at higher speeds (>14Mbps). Case is significant folks! Even if they meant the bus maxes out at 4MBps, their data doesn't get to 2MBps so I'm not sure where the 4 comes from. Additionally, they present data without specifying how it was gathered. That may simply be the result of the TimeDrive program they used to benchmark, in which case I argue the results are not very meaningful. I do not believe the results gathered there are comparable to the results gathered with Norton.

I personally use the lowest rated Kingston CF card and am very happy with it. I'm not out to run the fastest possible system, and I'm not out to convince you of anything at all. However, you have discounted informed reasoning as guesses, and misinterpreted gathered data to preserve your own preconceptions. If you really want to stick with a spinning platter or a SATA SSD or something else, I suggest you go for it. You don't need to justify or rationalize your decision to us.

JFYI, I've updated the charts to include the SanDisk Ultra II and Cheetah drive on the G4 to get a feel for whether the SE/30 is maxing out the device or not.

The update includes the UltraII card both on the G4's PATA bus as a slave, and using the SCSI-IDE converter setup as in the SE/30.

http://synack.net/~bbraun/se30disks/

The UltraII card has a much higher top end than the Cheetah drive. The SCSI-IDE converter seems to max out at about the 5MB/s of narrow SCSI-1 even though it is supporting the SCSI-2 protocol. But all of the above exceed the maximum values we're getting out of the SE/30.

I disagree with your interpretation... I'd really rather not dust off my old statistics book... I personally use the lowest rated Kingston CF card and am very happy with it. I'm not out to run the fastest possible system, and I'm not out to convince you of anything at all. However, you have discounted informed reasoning as guesses, and misinterpreted gathered data to preserve your own preconceptions. If you really want to stick with a spinning platter or a SATA SSD or something else, I suggest you go for it. You don't need to justify or rationalize your decision to us.

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There is no need to get so flustered over this. I apologize for having clearly upset you, but my intention was not to anger anyone. Such has never been my intention through all the years I have posted in this excellent forum.

Nevertheless, I stand by what I have said about the need for comparative benchmarks. I also stand by my thanks which I extended to you for providing such benchmark data. You did not have to do that, but you kindly did so. Indeed, I am truly humbled by the amount of time you clearly spend on that dedicated web page for the results. Again, I wish to thank you for that. No doubt others appreciate your efforts as well, even though they have not yet offered you their thanks yet.

But just because one or two among us is "satisfied with the performance of a low end CF card" does not mean we all must follow suit and be satisfied with that. I don't say this to upset you at all. I state it merely as a fact. Some are satisfied with the 16MHz processor in a stock SE/30. I have a 50MHz DiiMO 030 in mine. It's still an SE/30 running 68k software, upgraded yet in a largely stock condition. I simply say this to point out that the SE/30 allows for us to add various things to it to make it faster, and no, I am not talking about transforming it into a G4 or Intel Mac Mini either. I am talking about taking a stock Mac and upgrading it such that it can continue to operate as it was originally intended (to run 68k software natively on the CPU), but at faster speeds. That is what this thread is all about, but of course the "flash drive" discussion extends to Mac other than the SE/30 as well.

Such that we can all make "better informed decisions" I suggested some benchmarks in this thread. Then for whatever reason, the harsh words began. Perhaps some of you are hurt that I trust in benchmarks more than personal experience or educated guesses (however good those guesses may be). But I've not been attacked like this in other threads, so I am rather confused by all the harshness. Again, if I have offended, I apologize.

But I must stand by my original call for benchmarks, because such data is helpful in determining performance. And quite frankly, the more benchmarking data we can compile, the more easy it will be to select an appropriate flash drive solution for our vintage Mac, in accordance with our individual needs on performance.

Some seek the lowest cost solution. I seek a low cost solution, yet with the best performance possible. I personally want to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the flash drive solution I am going to pay money for, for use in my vintage Mac, is going to be FASTER (in most situations/tests) than the 7200rpm spinning platter drive I currently have installed. The only way to know which is the best is to have a robust number of comparative benchmarks.

If such benchmarks were utterly irrelevant, then it would not have been necessary for Macworld/Mac User magazine to offer them all these years, nor would Macworld today need to use their Speedmark testing. The fact is, there are many among us, myself included, who still like to see benchmarks. Right or wrong, benchmark data makes us feel better. And I personally think it helps me make a more informed purchasing decision. My main reason for even participating in this thread is because I have been in the market for a flash drive solution for my SE/30 for years, but I've not purchase yet because I've been holding out for comparative benchmarks.

From reviewing your excellent benchmark results web page, I see that the SanDisk Ultra II card is very close to the 10krpm Cheetah, which is a very fast drive to have in an SE/30, and faster than the 7200rpm IBM DGHS server drive I currently use in my SE/30. So if I dare to "guess" here (based upon what I read in your benchmarks anyway), it would probably be that even a faster card like the Extreme III or IV series may not yield much greater performance than what your benchmarks have shown. Of course, we would need to conduct a benchmark with a faster card to know for certain. But as you point it, it may be that the faster cards would not exceed the numbers shown in your Speed Info results.

So again, thank you for testing. You were very kind in doing so. I greatly appreciate it. And if others who own flash drive solutions would like to add to the benchmarks, then we all benefit as a result.

THANK YOU!

Thanks bbraun, these results are encouraging. I am in the process of procuring hardware for the conversion. I am a little put-off about getting one of the IDE-SCSI adapters that plug into the back of a CD drive since it seems it would be difficult to cleanly install it inside the case. Does anyone have some photos of their solution to installing one of these adapters?

I also have a question along side tt. Do any of these flash drive solutions have an output for the LED?

As you know, some vintage Macs like the SE/30 have an LED on the front case that allows you to see drive access. I currently have that hooked up to my IBM DGHS drive and it works perfectly. It would be nice to have the LED also work with a flash drive solution.

If you are using a SCSI -> IDE board then you can use an IDE -> CF board with an LED on it. Would have to remove the current LED and stick some wires on there but it is easy enough to do.

http://www.divshare.com/download/7966012-6b0

My Acard AEC-7720U scsi to ide card has a connection that drives an LED. When I had this installed with a 3.5 inch IBM 7200 IDE drive in my SE/30, I had the drive mounted backwards in the drive sled so that the Acard and drive power and scsi connections were pointing towards the front of the case rather than the rear (stock orientation). This allowed me to use the stock LED (with short lead wires) built into the drive sled to connect to the Acard and this gave me the desired flashing of the drive light when it was in use. I don't think I have a photo of this rig as I too am working my way towards an SSD but in a slightly different route. My plan was to connect the Acard to a 4GB Transcend IDE flash drive that I picked up from Buy.com: http://www.buy.com/prod/transcend-4gb-flash-module-4-gb-ide-internal/q/loc/101/207652979.html.

The snag with this approach is that the Acard and the Transcend drive have the same connection on them (like what is on an IDE ribbon cable) so I needed to track down some sort of gender changer/coupler. My first attempt was with this http://cgi.ebay.com/40-Pin-3-5-IDE-Drive-Gender-Changer-IDC-Cable-Adaptor_W0QQitemZ360188509658QQcmdZViewItemQQptZUK_Computing_CablesConnectors_RL?hash=item53dce87dda#ht_1074wt_1051 however this straight pin approach doesn't line the pins up correctly. Next I tried this ribbon cable http://cgi.ebay.com/2-inches-40-Pin-Male-to-Male-IDE-Gender-Changer_W0QQitemZ280448912385QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item414c0ecc01#ht_500wt_1037. Going this route initially didn't work in that the SE/30 (stock configuration with 8MB RAM) didn't see the drive when I booted to a 7.01 floppy. The Acard was in the same configuration as it was when it was successfully working with a hard drive so I don't think that was the issue. Next I pulled the Transcend drive and installed in a Mac with an IDE connection, formatted the drive and copied a working 7.01 install onto the Transcend. I then installed the Transcend back into the SE/30 and booted to the Sys 7 floppy and now the drive appeared. I used system picker to bless 7.01 system on the Transcend drive and then booted successfully to the Transcend drive. The issue that remains is that after the system boots, it will lock up when I attempt to open any programs. From there I need to power off... That is were I left the project a few months ago. I'll have some free time in the next couple of weeks to fiddle with this again. If anyone has thoughts on what went sideways, I'd love to hear them.

Assuming I can get this working, I was planning on using 3M double sided tape to secure the Acard and Transcend drive to the drive sled after I coat the area under the pieces with electrical tape. One more thing...when the system was booting with the Transcend drive, the Acard LED was flashing..

If anyone has thoughts on what went sideways, I'd love to hear them.

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I've found differences in behavior and performance depending on what does the partitioning and filesystem creation. The most reliable combination I found for 4GB and larger drives was to put them in an OSX machine, partition them using Disk Utility using an Apple Partition scheme, but only 1 partition of free space. Then take the drive and put it into the SE/30, and create a Mac Driver partition and Macintosh partition using a patched version of HD SC Setup 7.3.5 (patch mirrored here: http://synack.net/~bbraun/apple-hd-sc-setup-735-patch.hqx) to allow partitioning of non-Apple disks. Just remember, only 2GB or smaller partitions for maximum compatibility.

The next best solution I've encountered is Lido: http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/lido7.html

The most reliable combination I found for 4GB and larger drives was to put them in an OSX machine, partition them using Disk Utility using an Apple Partition scheme, but only 1 partition of free space. Then take the drive and put it into the SE/30, and create a Mac Driver partition and Macintosh partition using a patched version of HD SC Setup 7.3.5

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Does this advice pertain to flash drive solutions? I ask because my IBM DGHS spinning platter drive is 4.5GB (i.e., "4GB and larger") and I formatted and partitioned it on my SE/30. I run System 6, 7 and 8 on it flawless. I have done so with the SE/30 in stock condition and upgraded. I too used the patched Apple HDSC app though.

In other words, I must assume the "reliability issue" being spoken of here is being directed merely at flash drive solutions for vintage Macs.

Does this advice pertain to flash drive solutions? I ask because my IBM DGHS spinning platter drive is 4.5GB (i.e., "4GB and larger") and I formatted and partitioned it on my SE/30. I run System 6, 7 and 8 on it flawless. I have done so with the SE/30 in stock condition and upgraded. I too used the patched Apple HDSC app though.

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I did not intend to propose this as the one and only guaranteed to work in all cases and nothing else could possibly work solution. Merely what has worked most consistently for me in similar situations.

Here are some actual numbers showing fast CF cards on a Quadra 605's SCSI bus. The differences in speed will be less noticeable on an SE/30. This Quadra is 40 MHz and it is running Mac OS 8.1. The cards are connected via an Addonics CF to IDE adapter which is then connected to an Acard AEC-7720U IDE to UltraSCSI adapter. The 16 gig CompactFlash card is a Transcend "133x" and the two 2 gig cards are both SanDisk Ultra II ("15 MB/s") cards. The base reference is a 5400 RPM 300 gig Hitachi HTS54323 2.5" SATA drive connected via an Acard ARS-2000SU SATA to UltraSCSI adapter / case.

My SE/30's stock Apple drive was getting *very* noisy indeed, and a replacement 9gig IBM didn't improve things at all.

/Anders

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Just FYI -

One of the quietest narrow 50-pin SCSI drives that I've ever tested (and I've tested > 50 different models in the past) was Seagate ST318418N - 18gig, 7200 rpm. The other one was ST318417N, also quiet, just slightly slower. Both models are (were) relatively recent - I think I've tested them in 2007, on loan from the dealer. I kept the ST318418N and now it resides inside the overclocked Q605 @40 MHz. In fact, Q605's fan is louder than the drive.

So, Anders, just google a bit and I'm sure You'll be able to find one somewhere. At the end it's much more elegant solution than all that IDE/ATA/adapters etc. hassle.

Just make sure the boot partition is 2 gig or less and away you go

ojfd

P.S. That Q605 mentioned above is a real workhorse - it runs Cubase 3.0.1 (not XT and not VST, just plain MIDI) with two Opcode's Studio 4's under MROS (no OMS) and it's timing is almost on par with ST1040

Thanks for the tips on this thread. I installed a 40GB Kingston SSD using the ACARD ARS-2000SUP. I had a hell of a time getting it to format in my SE/30, but based on this info formatted it on my MacBook Pro and then things went fine in System 7. The box is SO much quieter now.

Hm. I spoke too soon. I can't seem to get the SSD to auto mount or to be the boot disk.

Any thoughts? Partitioning worked fine with Apple SC HD Setup (patched), and I could copy things to the drive, run them off of it, etc., but when I restart it's not mounted and I can't get it to boot. I have to open Apple SC HD Setup to get it to mount (by clicking update) or I can hit mount in Lido.

The ARS-2000SUP has different firmware than the ARS-2000SU. I had a problem where my ARS-2000SU units would not auto boot on m68k Macs or on Amigas when they had the ARS-2000SUP firmware. I downloaded the latest ARS-2000SU (no P) firmware from the Acard site and flashed it (had to install Windows on a spare motherboard to do it... what a pain!), and everything auto booted just fine after that. I bet your issue is the same.

Separately, there are instances where the Mac SCSI driver which gets installed onto the drive isn't the right one. You may have both problems, but I'd recommend fixing the firmware problem before looking at the SCSI driver problem.

Hmm. That means I'm going to need a SCSI card for my Windows box? Is that how the firmware update is done?

At least temporarily. Acard has flash update programs for Mac OS 9 (maybe 8.6, too), but not for OS X. However, the program to update the SATA-SCSI devices is apparently Windows only. I only upgraded mine because my drive kept spinning down way too often and the newer firmware fixed that.