Re: SCSI compatibility

[Roy <rovanknospam@telus.net>]

If you are in Ontario, I once corresponded (three years ago) with Tee Cashmore
<teecnospam@execulink.com> about Apple II support He is in the London area.
Here in Edmonton, Alberta, New World Electronics is the place to go. Ask for
Joe. <caledmnospam@attcanada.net> (Remove the nospam)

Roy

Wayne Stewart wrote:

> David Empson wrote:
>
> > There are other SCSI cards that will also work with System 6.0.1.  The
> > revision D RamFast should work fine, as long as it has recent enough
> > firmware.  You should get hold of the drivers for it as well (they don't
> > come with the system software).
>
> The Ramfast Driver is in the cards ROM. When you first use it, you'll
> see a ROMdisk on your desktop that contains the Driver and a program to
> access the cards built-in utilities. The utilities let you deactivate
> the ROMdisk and any partition or drive and contains formatting options
> and a few other options.
>
> > I expect that you could also use a revision C RamFast and some of the
> > other third party cards, but I don't have any experience with them.
> > Have a look for the FAQs for this newsgroup - they may have more useful
> > information.
>
> With the Rev C ramfast it depends on the ROM version. Later ROM versions
> are just about as good as the Rev D as far as I've been able to see .
>
> >
> >
> >>And how compatible are those SCSI cards with the more recent external SCSI
> >>CDROM drives and external SCSI hard drives?
> >
> >
> > For SCSI hard drives, either Apple card is your safest bet.  There have
> > been compatibility problems between the RamFast card and relatively
> > recent SCSI hard drives (notably the Quantum Fireball series), probably
> > due to the drive requiring that the host implement the SCSI arbitration
> > phase, which the RamFast doesn't do (but the Apple cards do).
>
> The compatibility problem appears to be with drives that require that
> the controller have a SCSI ID. Another problem is that the Ramfast has
> some compatibility problems with larger hard drives. I have a ramfast
> with a 4gb Quantum and have to use the onboard utilities to deactivate
> almost half of it. The ramfast is very very noticeably faster than
> either Apple SCSI cards. I'm also using a 40X Toshiba CD-reader with
> the ramfast. A bit of overkill as the IIgs can't use data at anywhere
> near that rate.
> A fair bit of Mac stuff passes through here and all CD readersI've tried
> seem to work with the ramfast (with the exception of the one CD burner
> I tried), at least as far as reading data CDs. I never had much
> interest in playing music CDs with the IIgs so I can't say how that goes
>
> Unfortunately the SCSI cards are out of production and are only
> available used but there are some ide cards being made. If you don't
> need a CD-ROM then the Focus card from Alltech might be a good
> possibility. It's a 2.5" ide drive on a card.
>
> http://www.allelec.com/indexa2.html
>
> Richard Dryer may be producing another batch of Compact flash/ide
> cards soon
> http://dreher.net/CFforAppleII/
>
> There's also ///SHH Systeme in Germany
> http://www.wbwip.com/shh/
>
> Where to find Apple II stuff in Canada? It's getting harder, in
> Vancouver I see almost none anymore. If there's a Mac use group in your
> area you might be able to locate some through them. Other than that,
> you're likely stuck with here and ebay. If you do buy something
> stateside make sure it isn't sent UPS. I believe they were  charging
> around $30 to complete the customs paperwork, that's above the shipping,
> GST and PST.
>
>         Wayne