[G4] SCSI, G4 Digital Audio, and OS 10.2.8

[Michael L. Brown]

Wade, I futzed with SCSI for years, from a magnificent 40 Mb CMS SCSI 
1 drive for my SE-30 in 1989, to my current accelerated G4/400 
Gigabit Ethernet. With the advent of OSX, I switched from Adaptec to 
Orange Micro 907 (non-bootable) and a 930U (bootable), because my 
external drives did not merit anything better. A no time would my G4 
every recover from more than a 30 second sleep without a reboot, 
though I could boot in OSX from an external SCSI via the OM 930U. 
After OS 10.1.5, and because I did not need, nor could afford, a RAID 
configuration, I switched to USB internal drives and a FireWire 
external back up. Still can't recover from sleep because of the USB 
2.0 PCI card to drive all the plug and play peripherals, but I have 
not had a system crash in over two years.

Advice. Probably not worth the cost to build an array to use the pair 
of Cheetahs, but if you decide to experiment, you should check out 
the Orange Micro Website carefully. They have firmware up-daters for 
each drive. Make sure that the 940UW can be configured to boot under 
which ever version of OSX you are using and there is a compatible 
firmware update. Basically you can set the firmware to be recognized 
in both OS9 and OSX, or to boot in either OS9, or boot in OSX, but 
not all three. As a rule, OSX is not fond of SCSI and you will become 
familiar with system extensions such as SCSI Helper, and spend a lot 
of time in OS9 doing disk maintenance. Additionally the card is 
likely to support internal drives, or external drives, but not both. 
After the lack of built in SCSI support in Jaguar, the clincher for 
me was the lack of plug and play and the constant switching back and 
forth between OS9 and OSX. So now I have a box of SCSI cables, a 
couple external drive enclosures and a drives in the closet. If and 
when I get my old souped up Mac 7500 back from a friend I will hook 
them up. I am not streaming video in real time, just mucking about in 
Adobe Photoshop and InDesign without having to earn a living with it.

Mike

G4/400 w/PGM-1000 cache card, Radeon 8500, internal Pioneer 105 
DVD-RW, M-Audio Revolution 7.1 sound card, external 120Gb FireWire 
and the original CD-DVDR drive in an external enclosure.


>Attention All SCSI Genii,
>
>I have been given (2) 80 pin pristine ( 1 is new) Seagate Cheetah 18Gb LVD
>10,000 rpm SCSI drives. I found an Orange Micro  PCI Grappler 940UW SCSI
>card on sale for 29.49 + 6.00 shipping.
>
>My question is: Does anyone use SCSI successfully in OS X? Can you boot from
>an internal SCSI drive in OS X? I have seen fairly cheap external SCSI cases
>on eBay (10.00 USD), would an external SCSI drive boot in OS X?
>
>These drives would be used for back-up and DVD/iMovie project storage. Is it
>worth 40.00 to utilize these drives.
>
>Looking forward to your replies.
>--
>Wade A. Perry

-- 
Almost never pointless.