Spread Spectrum Clocking is a way to lower electromagnetic interference or EMI. This is important for storage solutions that are required to pass FCC and other agency certifications. All current Serial ATA disk drives implement SSC (some allow you to turn this feature on/off). However, some older SATA drives do not implement SSC. All Sonnet Serial ATA host adapter cards support SSC but will also work with disk drives that do not.
After Apple released Apple Mac Pro EFI Firmware v1.3 on 3/27/08, the Sonnet Tempo SATA E2P card no longer worked in slot 2 of the Mac Pro Early 2008 Model 3,1. Slot 2 is a x16 PCIe 2.0 slot. The solution is to move the Tempo SATA E2P card to either slot 3 or 4, which are x4 PCIe 1.1 slots. The Tempo SATA E2P card works fine in the PCIe 2.0 slots in the Mac Pro (Early 2009) Model 4,1.
