i have a firewire direct PCI/USB card in the top slot of an S900 (g4 upgraded) and am quite happy with it. I originally purchased it a few years back and was running OS 9.1 for a few years without a hitch. once in a while i lost the USB signal to the mouse when i was copying a large amount of files through firewire but it was solved simply by re-plugging in the mouse. i might also note, and this isn't so much related to firewire as it is to apple, but OS 9 doesn't seem to like dealing with moving 10,000 files or more (you might notice this when using firewire backup drive.) i never really lost anything but did crash a few times on backups. i have to say one thing i love about firewire though is that if you ever lose the connection, you can simply power back up or replug in and many time the connection picks up where it lefft off. can't do that with scsi!
on drive recommendation, i had a WD 30gb firewire drive at first and did have some problems with it. it seemed to lie in the firewire controller though, because after i had finally given up on the drive, i ordered a new OWC Mercury FW 800 drive (which i can recommend 110% - it rocks) and thought i would see for sure so i swapped out the drives in the case and low-and-behold the drive was fine, it was the old WD case. anyway, i'd say go OWC, great company, great support (esp. for old-world macs) and great products. good luck. christopher ps: btw everyone, i finally took the dive last week and installed OS-X 10.2.8 on my S900 with Maxpowr G4/400 upgrade. XPostFacto was a breeze and after reformatting drive with Drive Setup (OS9), i was able to reboot and install. I also used powerlogix Cache Control X which was great because i didn't even need to reboot in OS9 to get it to to work. Performace before this was slow but now seems to be much quicker. so far so good, i just can't believe I didnt do it sooner ;-) the general specs are: 648 MB RAM, MaxPowr g4/400 upgrade, USB/FW card (#1), radeon 7000 (#2), 9gb seagate scsi on internal bus. i have an ATTO UW SCSI card for it but had many problems so it's out for now. only other thing i would like to do now is put an IDE/ATA card in so i can use that spare 30GB drive ;-) anyone want to trade the ATTO for an ATA card? ATTO works great in OS9. On Fri, 07 Nov 2003 00:10:24 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Hi all, > > Thanks to everyone who replied to my questions about upgrading to OS 9.1. > Anyone have any recommendations for a FireWire external drive and controller > card they are happy with running OS 9.1 on an S900? I have heard from one or > two sources that FireWire storage drives tend not to work so well off the > S900s. Any truth to that? Thanks for all feedback. > > Elliot > -- 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! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; 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/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
