what SCSI card to use?

[lethe]

what SCSI card should i use? when you configure a mac on the apple store website, they give you a choice to add a SCSI card for $49. i assumed that they were selling the adaptec 2906 SCSI card. so i bought one. but this card is not bootable. I want to buy a SCSI card that will have two channels a 50 pin internal Ultra160, and a DB25 external one to connect my older SCSI-2 devices. The adaptec 2906 has the right connections, but it s not bootable.

So what is the card for me? what is the card that apple ships with its SCSI powermacs?

[AdmiralAK]

I am not quite sure what SCSI card apple uses but this is my advice, dont make firther investments in SCSI devices. Apple is jumping off teh SCSI ship ... You are better off getting a SCSI to firewire adaptor if sich a thing exists for your current devices.

[themacko]

SCSI =
FireWire =

[lethe]

well sure, it s obvious that firewire is better than scsi. it s much much faster, it s hot swappable, and you can have, how many? 255 devices? my scsi chain only allows 7. so for external devices there is no question that firewire is preferred.

but let s talk about internal devices. you have a choice between IDE and SCSI, i will take SCSI every time. the drives go up 15,000 rpm, as compared to IDE 7,200, and the data rates something like 160 MB/s for ultra160, compared to 33 MB/s for IDE. and SCSI lets you have 7 devices on a chain compared to IDEs 2.

if you go to apple s configure your machine website, and click more info next to the hard drive choices, they will lay it all out for you, and tell you that SCSI is definitely the hard drive of choice for performance machines.

I am migrating from my powermac 9600 to a G4, finally. I have a 40 GB 15,000 rpm scsi ultra 160 hard drive, and i would like to be able to use it in my new machine. i don t have to tell you that a hard drive like that costs a lot of money, and i would like to be able to use it. it was too fast even for an old powermac 9600 with only a fast scsi-2 bus. so for an internal drive, i want SCSI. i thought that if i were getting a SCSI card, i could get one that would also support my old SCSI external peripherals. it looked like the adaptec 2906 was exactly what i needed. but i can t boot off the drive, so it s pretty much useless.

now apple is definitely still supporting SCSI, at least for it s internal devices. i think they will continue to do so until something better than the current choices come along. i want to know what card they use for it.

[jasonh]

A few years ago I got a B/W G3 350Mhz and bought the adaptec 2930U (PCI) to chain an external HD, CDR (yamaha crw4260tx), and an old Agfa scanner.
The power on the external HD broke so I ripped out the drive and connected it to the SCSI card internally (with a few pin modifications!).

I didn't think once about wether or not MacOS public beta would boot from the drive as I was a bit naive at the time. However, I installed it and it worked first time and I haven't had a problem since.

Now I'm running 10.2 and still no problems with the card, apart from the fact the finder will play audio from my cd-r but toast can't find the drive with all the latest updates - tried all firmwares etc... I'll fix it!

Anyway, my conclusion is that there is still some life left in SCSI which I'm happy about, however my future purchases are going to be firewire.