[MrNo]

Does someone know which SCSI cards are supported in Jaguar. I've ried using Adaptes AHA 2940/W and the system recognized the card, however after I hooked the drive to it nothing happend. I've checked to see if maybe the drive was not terminated properly, but that was fine. Then I hooked up the card to Windoze box running 2k and it found both card and disk without a problem. Any ideas on which cards to use and are there any hacks that would make this one work.

[Rainy Day]

Try restarting the Mac with the drive powered up.

On my Mac i can hook up and power on a FireWire drive at anytime, and the autodiskmount daemon will mount it, but if a SCSI drive isn't powered on when MacOS X boots, nothing will mount the drive. At least that seems to be the case with my external SCSI CD-RW drive (doesn't require a CD in the drive; merely that it be powered on during boot). I can even ask Retrospect to rescan looking for drives, but it won't find anything. Same goes for Toast.

I would love to find a way to mount SCSI drives after boot. There should be a way, but i haven't found it. I've played with mount but it doesn't appear to do the trick. I only wish SCSI Probe was compatible with Classic.

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by MrNo:
Does someone know which SCSI cards are supported in Jaguar. I've ried using Adaptes AHA 2940/W and the system recognized the card, however after I hooked the drive to it nothing happend.

The 2940 cards are not supported in OS X. If the card worked in Windows, it may not be a Mac card at all, and may not even work in OS 9. (OS X support information on Adaptec cards can be found at Adaptec's website.) If the device you have is a narrow SCSI device, the Adaptec 2930U works fine; otherwise, I'd recommend going with an ATTO card.
Chris

[MrNo]

I just looked at the Adaptec web site and it says they support PowerDomain 2940 W and UW. My question now is this the same card as AHA 2940 W/UW or is it a completely different card. Unfortunately I don't have any Mac cards, I just got this old B&W for free and I am trying to add 10000 Rpm SCSI drive to it and upgrade the processor in order to boost performance a little bit. So investing in a new card is out of the question since my cash reserves are low at this time of the year

[Rainy Day]

You may find that, under MacOS X, maxing out the RAM and a fast HD will do much more for performance than upgrading the processor. A processor upgrade may not be worth the $$$.

[MrNo]

Well I have 2 512 stick of RAM which I didn't test yet but I don't see why wouldn't they want to work, and I got this SCSI drive that I think will help a lot (that's if I can make the card work). As far as processor I saw a G4 450 upgrade on the OWC web site for 200$ which is not too much. Then I need a new video card and the only decent PCI card I saw was a Radeon 7000 I think for 100$. So for 300$ I get a desktop that will last at least a year I hope and afterward I'm sure it would be a good web server

[Rainy Day]

Well 1 Gb RAM sounds sufficient. (Be aware that some RAM which runs fine under MacOS 9 does not work under MacOS X, however.)

Although this is somewhat subjective, in my experience, processor upgrades are generally a waste of money, however YMMV. While you may get a faster CPU on paper, real world performance may not be as good as you might expect because you usually have bottlenecks due to other factors, such as bus speeds and the like, which often limit performance relative to a newer machine. Sometimes the best course of action is to save one's money and buy a new Mac when you can.

I dropped a faster HD into an old Mac and you would have thought i doubled the speed of the CPU. MacOS X is a disk-intensive OS. If i had actually doubled the speed of the CPU, however, it would not have felt as fast (as there would still have been a bottleneck with the disk).

If i were in your position, i'd spend money on a SCSI card (if needed) before a CPU upgrade. But one size rarely fits all, and your needs may be different. What are you using this box for? That could change the equation.

Regarding graphics cards, bear in mind that MacOS X does not support onboard graphics acceleration for many "older" chipsets. I have no idea whether the Radeon 7000's graphics acceleration is supported or not. If acceleration is not supported, even though the CPU may be running faster, screen drawing may remain painfully slow. Another argument for saving $$$ now and investing in a new Mac when you can afford it.

[ChrisF]

Originally posted by MrNo:
I just looked at the Adaptec web site and it says they support PowerDomain 2940 W and UW. My question now is this the same card as AHA 2940 W/UW or is it a completely different card.

I think you've misread the Adaptec knowledgebase article. I quote: "Currently we support Mac OS X 10.1 and later and Mac OS X Server 10.1 and later with all of the currently shipping PowerDomain SCSI Cards.

This includes:
Adaptec SCSI Card 2906
PowerDomain 2930
PowerDomain 29160
PowerDomain 29160N
PowerDomain 39160"
(This is from Answer ID 1812 from Adaptec's knowledgebase.) Note that they say "currently shipping." None of the Mac 2940 cards are current.
The PowerDomain cards are *not* the same as the AHA-2940 from a PC, so it sounds like you're out of luck. I have successfully flashed a PC 39160 with Mac firmware and it works fine, but I don't think that's possible on the 2940UW.
Chris

[cLouD[x]]

Hello,

I have been running the adaptec 2940U2B for a very long time in my G4.

Here is what shows up in system profiler in 10.2.6

Card type: scsi-2
Card Name: ADPT,2940U2B
Card Model: ADPT,1757800-00
Vendor ID: 9005
Device ID: 10
ROM#: 1.2
Revision 1

As far as I know this scsi card used to be a preG4 scsi card bundled with macs a long way back

[MrNo]

Well this is B&W G3 300 overclocked to 400, and I thought that a bit faster and Altivec capable processor would actually help the overall performance. Saving for a new machine would take me a while but spending 200$ is not so much if I can make this run for some time.

I don't play to many games, but I do some light Photoshop work and some Web Desing plus I would just do regular stuff on it like surfing, email maybe see a movie etc.

I think we have some older G4's here in the shop with SCSI cards that no one is using so I might be able to get one of those.

I was hoping that maybe I could get this PC card to work, but it seems not so I'll have to seek some other solution.

Thanks for reply guys.

Originally posted by Rainy Day:
Well Although this is somewhat subjective, in my experience, processor upgrades are generally a waste of money, however YMMV. While you may get a faster CPU on paper, real world performance may not be as good as you might expect because you usually have bottlenecks due to other factors, such as bus speeds and the like, which often limit performance relative to a newer machine. Sometimes the best course of action is to save one's money and buy a new Mac when you can.

I dropped a faster HD into an old Mac and you would have thought i doubled the speed of the CPU. MacOS X is a disk-intensive OS. If i had actually doubled the speed of the CPU, however, it would not have felt as fast (as there would still have been a bottleneck with the disk).

If i were in your position, i'd spend money on a SCSI card (if needed) before a CPU upgrade. But one size rarely fits all, and your needs may be different. What are you using this box for? That could change the equation.

Regarding graphics cards, bear in mind that MacOS X does not support onboard graphics acceleration for many "older" chipsets. I have no idea whether the Radeon 7000's graphics acceleration is supported or not. If acceleration is not supported, even though the CPU may be running faster, screen drawing may remain painfully slow. Another argument for saving $$$ now and investing in a new Mac when you can afford it.

[fritzair]

My B&W upgrade wasn't expensive, with a move to a 550 G4, I moved a raid card into the slot and found some great speed improvement. Downside is the RAID can not be a boot volume!
I have a ADPT,2930CU, ADPT,1686806-04 SCSI card which needs, as others have said, all devices on the chain to be on during bootup. I too would love to see SCSI probe ported to OS X.

[Rainy Day]

Well this is B&W G3 300 overclocked to 400, and I thought that a bit faster and Altivec capable processor would actually help the overall performance. Saving for a new machine would take me a while but spending 200$ is not so much if I can make this run for some time.

I don't play to many games, but I do some light Photoshop work and some Web Desing plus I would just do regular stuff on it like surfing, email maybe see a movie etc.

The G4 will definitely help with the Photoshop work as that's basically number crunching.

But playing movies and web surfing are very disk intensive tasks (although some number crunching is involved too). If the HD is a bottleneck (and it always is to some degree), a faster CPU will only burn more CPU cycles waiting for the HD. A fast CPU will still have to wait as long as a slow CPU for the HD. HD's are always lots slower than RAM or even a slow CPU. That's why a faster HD can make a big difference; and why faster CPU's don't always improve overall performance as much as you might expect.

If movies play well now, then there's no advantage to a faster CPU (in that regard). However if they don't play well now, then perhaps the G4 might help there (but the bottleneck is just as likely to be disk speed or available RAM). Same goes for web surfing. The G4 might help some, but disk speed and RAM are probably more critical factors there too.

My advice is to load up your board with all your available RAM (if you haven't already done so) and get a faster drive on-line first, and see how performance is improved. Then if you're unsatisfied with it, consider spending the $$$ on the G4.