Hi,
I was hoping for a SCSI adapter running from the Firewire 400 bus.
Haven't found one though. I'm not sure I really trust USB adapters for
this purpose. Not so much from the transfer rates, but more because
there have been so many poor quality USB interfaces (speaking
generally), and due to the transfers being managed more directly by the
CPU. My understanding is that Firewire not only has the superior
bandwidth, but that it also features dedicated host control hardware to
manage the transfers. Any advice on this matter would be appreciated.
The alternative I was considering was to have the SCOPE PCI cards hosted
in the MDD PCI slots, a Magma PCI expansion host card in the last on
board slot, and a PCI SCSI card + Korg OASYS PCI mounted within the
expansion chassis. I don't know how well this would perform though. I
guess it would be fine. I believe professional studios were doing
something similar for running Pro Tools rigs back in the day.
I have a 19" equipment rack standing next to my MDD. I would likely
house an expansion chassis there.
I originally chose the MDD as I had access to a cheap dual 1.42 GHz
model with TI4600, 2 GB RAM (1.5GB usable, I know) locally. The faster
memory bandwidth appealed to me for live audio processing/generation. I
don't really know how much of an issue this is in practice though. Also,
I used to use my father's old PPC 6600/60, and I have nightmares about
slow performance in general.
Would you be able to recommend a different model with more PCI slots? I
would rather not go too far back in terms of performance. If the memory
bus is OK, and I can fit a decent single CPU accelerator, that would be
fine.
I also considered picking up an old G3 laptop with on board SCSI just
for interfacing with the samplers. However, my space is getting somewhat
crowded/complicated for computers/instruments. I can add SCSI to my main
studio PC, but some software will only run well under Mac OS 9.
Cheers,
Oli
On 28/08/12 11:25, Kris Tilford wrote:
On Aug 27, 2012, at 12:45 PM, Oliver Fairhall wrote:
All my PCI slots are taken up.
All three? Isn't there one card you could move or sacrifice?
I would like to know what is the best featured/most reliable option
for adding SCSI for this machine, that doesn't use a PCI slot?
You covered the options, which are few, rare, and probably not optimal.
I have heard of PCI expansion racks to add more PCI slots; are these
any good?
Even if you had an expansion rack, where would it go so you could mount
the cards? This would seem to be kludgy unless you plan some serious mod
work to adapt such a rack into your G4. There are old Macs with 6 PCI
slots which would be cheaper for the entire Mac than adding such an
expansion rack.
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