I apologize if some of you have already seen this. I sent it last week but it never showed up in the digest.
We've had problems with that. I think they are being ironed out.
I am now the proud owner of a B&W 400 Mhz, 512 MB, 80 MB HD, Rev. 2 motherboard.
Good. They are, in Rev. 2 form, one of the greatest Macs of all time. I love mine to bits, and I have a much faster iMac (which I also love but not as profoundly :-) ).
I am currently running 8.6 but plan to upgrade to Panther:
1. I have heard that OSX has problems with SCSI but cannot find any details. Does anybody have a recommendation of a cheap SCSI PCI card that works well under OSX?
Panther (10.3.x certainly up to 10.3.2, dunno if anything has transpired in 10.3.3...) has a very bad flaw in it that affects SCSI and Firewire timing. This flaw has seen users of Firewire external drive tearing their hair out in some circumstances, especially where booting is concerned. I personally have not got 10.3.2 to boot from my PCI ACARD U2W card yet, but it is in a 9600 that is totally unsupported so that is maybe not SO surprising, however it works fine on the 9600's internal 50-pin bus. Anyway, in short, if you do fit one check THOROUGHLY for corruption in transfers and the stored data on the drives *before* you use a PCI SCSI card. I'm not scare-mongering here - it' totally shot holes in the data on one of mine in the 9600. AFAIK it's not harmful to the drives themselves or the card, just the data.
Just my 2 cents - it's doable but you have to be careful. Oh and if anyone knows a good way of large scale testing drives or RAID arrays for corruption in the data on them or the read/write stream then please let me know. I have a 24.6GB 3 drive array in my 9600 that I won't use until I know Panther isn't going to chew up the contents!
IMHO if you are looking for affordable high performance storage on a machine like that then a PCI Serial ATA card and a pair of 120GB drives would be far more preferable and probably cheaper. SATA performs a lot better on the CPU interrupt side than ATA133, to the extent that although the drives are rarely any faster to transfer data in benchmarks, in real-life usage they way out pace ATA133 systems as the CPU has a lot more free power during disk transfers. It's not quite U160 or U320 SCSI but it stores more and costs less, to the extent that is is used in the Apple PowerMac G5 and XServe G5 machines.
2. I need a modem. Is my only option the high priced modems that fit in the B&W modem slot? What about PCI or USB modems? Can I get OSX drivers for these?
I was fortunate enough to get a Global Village modem in mine. There are precious few USB modems that work on a Mac, and even fewer that work well. PCI is an unknown for me. Most are WinModems so won't work in a Mac full stop, but i am unsure as to what 'full' modems have drivers.
What about internet sharing? I turned on internet sharing on my iBook but can't seem to get the B&W to access it.
It should work, I have done is successfully using double ethernet interfaces. It might take a bit of tarting about to set it up, and you need to be well enough voiced in TCP/IP to set the client machine up right.
3. Can I put older PCI cards in the B&W. For example, I have a P166 DOS card.
IIRC the P166 DOS card is not supported at all in the B&W G3. I have half a feeling a friend of mine got one working at one point but it was in OS 8.6. Certainly an absolute no-go in OS X.
-- Mark Benson
AIM - SilValleyPirate MSN - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit FlatPackMacs online: <http://fpm.68kmac.com> Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>
"Never send a human to do a machine's job."
-The Matrix
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