Re: HDD Faq?

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

"Al Stramiello" <docal1000@email.msn.com> wrote:

>Where is the FAQ for Apple II SCSI cards and HDD?

Hi, I can give you the low down on Apple II SCSI cards and HDD.

1) Ramfast SCSI card.  It is a fast caching SCSI card, supports DMA,
   but has some compatibility problems with certain SCSI drives
   that require the controller to have an SCSI ID (Ramfast does not).

2) Apple High Speed SCSI.  It is fast, but a tad slower than Ramfast.
   It supports DMA.  It is the most compatible card.  I'm running
   a 1GB IBM SCSI hard drive with this card chained to a CD-ROM
   drive and an Iomega Zip Drive.  When Apple released this card,
   they had a streaming video demo with a full screen movie clip of
   Star Wars the size of an entire 40MB hard drive run continuously.
   The clip was able to run off the hard drive at 30 frames per
   second, 960MB/sec of data transfer.

3) Apple SCSI Card (Rev. C).  This card is slow.  It has problems
   with removable media on 8-bit Apple IIs or IIGS in 8-bit mode.
   Under GS/OS, the IIGS 16-bit operating system, it handles
   removable media OK.

4) The CMS SCSI II card.  These are bad, period.

Of the above, the Ramfast is the only one still being made.  You can
buy one from http://www.sequential.com/ Sequential Systems.  The
other ones are used.

I recommend the Apple High Speed SCSI card.  It offers the most
compatibility with SCSI devices.  You can run pretty much any
SCSI hard drives with it.  It even supports the original
Apple Flatbed Scanner.

SCSI drives are not the only option.  http://www.allelec.com/
Alltech Electronics sells the IDE Focus hard drives, which are
hard drive on controller card "hardcards."  ///SHH Systeme
also makes several IDE controllers, one of which is as fast as
the Ramfast and supports drive geometries of up to 2GB.

Good luck!

PS: I found the GNO web site you were looking for.  It is
http://www.gno.org/ and you can download GNO from here.