At 07:58 -0400 04/19/2002, Phillip L.Meza wrote: >Hello Listers, Anyone using DVD on their machines (S900)? Can anyone >point me in the right direction as to which drive to purchase. I am >using 2 drives internally now Matshita CD-ROM & Yamaha CDRW , I would >like to install the CDROM into a 2nd machine I have. Anyone deal with >a reseller in Los Angeles - AllAppleMac.com (ICNI)? They have a few >Maxpowr Cards on hand, prices seem rather high?
I am using an Acer 16X DVD/40X CDROM drive attached to a VST UltraTech/66 ATA66 card (IDE). It works flawlessly using Apple's DVD/CDROM Extension in both OS 9.1 and 8.6. The ATAPI support on the VST card is very good. I use this drive with a Wired4DVD card and DVDs play very nicely, although I ran into a problem with play just stopping and the screen image freezing a couple of times. Didn't freeze up the computer, the image just stopped, the sound continued for a few moments and then that froze. Hitting Pause, Play started it up again. Very odd. It only happened a couple of times, but figured I'd throw that in for fairness. I'm less enthused about the VST card, since I've discovered several odd incompatibilities caused by the card, but it really does ATAPI drives (CD and DVD related) well. Note that other more compatible ATA cards may do ATAPI as well. The incompatibilities I've found (YMMV) with the VST include: 1) Freezes S900/J700 if installed in lower slots unless: A) It is the only card in the lower slots B) There are no drives connected to the VST Card (useful configuration, huh?) C) The only other cards in the lower slots have no onboard firmware (e.g. ethernet, USB, firewire cards) D) It is in a physically higher (lower numbered) slot than a Twin Turbo card (this may have worked once with a 2940U2B but I wasn't able to reproduce it). 2) Under OS 9.1 (and only 9.1) when there is a 2940U2B, E100 or PCI Jackhammer installed in the same machine (slot placement does not matter for this one) either the machine freezes as the OS starts to load, or when the machine boots, all support for HFS+ volumes is disabled. That means that HFS+ volumes do not mount, the option to create HFS+ volumes under the Special Menu, Erase Disk item is missing and if you do create an HFS+ volume using a third party utility such as SoftRAID, the volume will not mount, unless: A) I had some luck dropping the firmware of the 2940U2B back to 1.1 from 1.2 but the problem came back B) HFS+ support was present when I had an ancient 9 GB Fast & Wide volume on the external connector of the 2940U2B, however that drive was formatted with RAID ToolKit 1.8s (that's about eight years old and out of date). C) Having any bootable CD in the CDROM drive (even though the machine was booting from the hard drive) seemed to alleviate the problem. This is a weird one. I think there are other aspects to this problem that I haven't sussed out yet, but removing the VST card makes the problems go away. 3) The presence of the VST card in any slot seems to affect the Internal Fast SCSI bus (SCSI Bus 0) such that Retrospect operations from devices on Bus 0 fail. This bodes ill for data integrity on Bus 0 devices even if Retrospect isn't being used, because it's been my experience that Retrospect is a bit of a canary for SCSI problems. It will fail when you have only minor problems you wouldn't have noticed ordinarily, but those minor problems, left unfixed, can lead to data corruption and loss of entire hard drives in the long run. This problem also bears more investigating. But I tested many times, and the VST card present made Bus 0 useless for Retrospect operations under various OS versions. Another test to try would be to see if MacBench Disk tests will complete for a volume on Bus 0 when the VST card is present. MacBench tends to be good at finding SCSI problems too. Jeff Walther -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | SPECIAL SM LIST PRICES - 24x Bootable SCSI CDROM $39.99, Umax Processors $19.99 PowerSupplies from C500/C600 $49.99 J700/S900 $79.99 <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
