[X4U] FireWire and low end Macs

[David Ledger]

At 20:13 -0600 6/2/09, Ed Gould wrote:
>On Feb 6, 2009, at 10:37 AM, Doug McNutt wrote:
>>  For now I like SE/30's with their good old RS422 serial ports and 
>>look forward to a return of SCSI with those 50 pin cables replaced 
>>by LVDS pairs..
>
>IMO it is a combination of plug & play & firewire (for the most 
>part) but the other part is ease and speed. I used to own a PC that 
>had SCSI exclusively and it was not a pretty picture to add drives 
>to it (IMO). I had a CDROM and an external HD both running through 
>SCSI and it was a pure night mare getting those two added on. I was 
>able to take out and install a power supply in less than 30 minutes 
>on the PC the HD and CDROM were hours of effort and lots of calls to 
>my local SCSI expert (free) in order to get them to even work. Sorry 
>SCSI is OK if you do not want to add anything to it.

That would be because it was a PC. SCSI isn't plug-n-play but with 
fully compliant hardware its main problem was the limit of seven 
devices + host (for basic SCSI). I ran my PowerMac 6100 with a MO 
drive, CDRW drive, one of those 5.25" cartridge drive thingies, a 
hard drive or two, a scanner, and briefly an Exabyte drive 
(Retrospect wouldn't work reliably with it) in various combinations. 
I had to use 'SCSI probe' (or whatever it was called) quite a bit. I 
also have an Apollo or two, although not run up for a few years. They 
were quite happy with a 5.25" tape cartridge, an Exabyte and several 
disc packs. They just worked, but the Apollo was a much more 
expensive machine.

David


-- 
David Ledger - Freelance Unix Sysadmin in the UK.
HP-UX specialist of hpUG technical user group (www.hpug.org.uk)
david.ledger at ivdcs.co.uk
www.ivdcs.co.uk