At 13:40 -0500 03/29/2002, Geoffrey Arend wrote:
>First off, is there a searchable archive of messages? That way I don't >have to bother anyone with easy to find answers. There is an archive of list messages at the lowendmac.com website. We really need a FAQ but no-one inclined to compile one has been able to make the time to do so. :-) >Have there been problems with this card? OWC makes it out to be the >holy grail. She has a string of SCSI devices attached to her S900 200. >She is also running 8.1. I was thinking of updating the system to 9.0. >IS this a mistake? Should the SCSI numbers be changed? If so, how do I >do it? Don't panic. Imagine the former written in large friendly letters on the cover of an unthreatening book... Right, well, as David wrote, in most instances you should be okay. Here are the known incompatibilities in the S900 with the VST UltraTech/66. These are my experiences. I don't believe anyone else has reported contradictory experiences, but as always, your mileage may vary. 1) Don't install the VST card in the lower four slots unless it is the only card in any of the lower four slots. The VST needs one of the top two slots. Forced to coexist with other cards in the lower slots the VST will cause the S900/J700 to freeze at the gray screen. The exceptions to this are that the VST might coexist with USB cards, firewire cards (but not combo USB/Firewire cards), and ethernet cards (PCI cards with no onboard firmware). Also, if the VST is in a higher slot (closer to power supply) than a Twin Turbo they seem to coexist in the lower slots. All other video cards I've tested cause a freeze. This problem is independent of the OS used. It does not manifest if you do not connect any drives to the VST, but how useful is that? 2) When installed in the same machine as an Apple/Adaptec 2940U2B under OS 9.1 the VST causes all support for HFS+ volumes to disappear. HFS+ volumes won't mount and volumes cannot be initialized as HFS+. This problem does not exist under 8.6. Having a bootable CDROM in the CDROM drive seemed to alleviate the problem. Note: not booting from the CD, just present in the drive at boot time. Weird. Dropping the 2940U2B to firmware 1.1 from 1.2 seemed to alleviate the problem for a time, but it returned with a vengance. In it's second incarnation, the computer would freeze just as it started to load the OS unless there was a bootable CD in the drive. With a CD present, the machine would boot up, but all HFS+ support would be absent. This wasn't some weird corruption problem, either. I reformatted all drives and reinstalled trying to nail this thing. Restoring my files after the reformat is what led to the discovery of number 4. 3) See number 2 above only with the E100 card and possibly the PCI JackHammer. 4) The presence of the VST card causes problems on the internal Fast SCSI bus. While I've only seen problems with Retrospect, I've been using Retrospect since version 2.1 (about seven years). These particular symptoms invariably indicate a fault on the SCSI bus which will also manifest as freezes during large file transfers, corruption, etc. In this case Retrospect is a bit like a canary that detects problems before they become apparent in other ways. At this point I wouldn't trust putting any devices on the internal Fast bus with the VST in the machine--not and expect good data integrity. The external/internal unenhanced SCSI bus seems to be fine. So, as long as the VST is in one of the top two slots, or the only card in lower slots, you aren't using a 2940U2B or E100 with OS 9.1, and you don't really need your internal Fast SCSI bus for anything, you should be fine. Now, that last bit, number 4, it is conceivable that it only occurs when there is also another PCI SCSI card present. However, I tested it with a 2940UW and an E100 and under multiple OS revisions, and there was no variation in the problem. So while there may be details I have not uncovered, I think the VST card just hoses the internal SCSI bus (Bus 0). Also, numbers 2 and 3 could exist with other SCSI cards. I've tested it with the 2940UW, 2940U2B and the E100 and it's present with the latter two and not the former one. I haven't tested it with any other cards. I really want to run my hard drives with LVD SCSI (U2W) so I'm thinking about getting a Miles2 card from Initio, but I don't know if the VST has the same problem with that. If one of the other ATA cards has good ATAPI support (works with CDROM/DVD players) then it probably makes more sense just to ditch the VST card and buy a different ATA card. Jeff Walther -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 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