On Jun 7, 2005, at 10:09 PM, Stephen Hurd wrote:

David Kelly wrote:


Think possibly I didn't speak clearly enough. Apple is not *adding* commodity-ness to their product line. Thinking about it I'd bet part of the deal with Intel is a special crypto block or similar in the CPU uniquely identifying it as an Apple Blessed CPU. Apple does this very thing with disk drives. Originally Apple SCSI drivers would only format and configure Apple-blessed drives. Currently the same thing holds true for internal CD/DVD drives. But put the same non-Apple drive on Firewire and MacOS is happy with it.


You must be dealing with an older "originally" than I. I've replaced the 40MB HD in an SE/30 with a 700-oddMB IBM one from a PS/ 2 with no issues. Ditto for a pair of uh... *goes and looks* IIci macs. Are we talking way back when Apple didn't use standard SCSI-1 (Which, I think is because there was no formal standard)? May as well complain that you couldn't replace the "non-standard" 800k floppy with a "standard" 720k one.

No, "Apple SC Setup" would not do a non-Apple SCSI drive. This might have changed with MacOS 9. MacOS X has never complained about any IDE HD I have tried.

As for "standard SCSI" there were a lot of things being done by everyone back then which was questionable. "Blind reads" for one. A number of companies made a good living making and supporting 3rd party Macintosh SCSI drivers. As varied as the hardware compliance was back then it was very wise of Apple not to stick their neck out for hard drives they did not sell.

Recently I put a Sony CD-RW in a G4-400 running MacOS X 10.2.x. To use Apple's drivers I had to hack out the name of an Apple product in a file and substitute the ID string the Sony answered with. Would have to do the same thing if one purchased a non-Apple Pioneer DVD-RW drive even with the latest OS. I don't know why, or make apologies for Apple but it might have something to do with the reason FreeBSD does not enable DMA on ATAPI by default:

ATA(4) says:
Unknown ATAPI devices are initialized to DMA mode if the hw.ata.atapi_dma tunable is set to 1 and they support at least UDMA33 transfers. Other- wise they are set to PIO mode because severe DMA problems are common even if the device capabilities indicate support. You can always try to set DMA mode on an ATAPI device using atacontrol(8), but be aware that your hardware might not support it and can potentially hang the entire system
     causing data loss.


--
David Kelly N4HHE, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
========================================================================
Whom computers would destroy, they must first drive mad.

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