asking for opinion: WGS 8150 vs. Radius 81/110

[trag]

I think the WGS may have started with 100, but the one I have is the "speed bump" 110. There is a "technically" faster point with the Radius; the internal SCSI buss is faster than on any of the Macs of the time. This is another reason why I'm going with the Radius, I'll use the OS drive on the stock internal buss. I know it will be slower, but make troubleshooting easier.

The SCSI buses on the Radius are identical to the SCSI buses on the Apple because the Radius logic board and ROM is identical to the Apple logic board and ROM with the single exception that the Radius board omits the HD-45 connector and substitutes a 15 pin video connector for the DRAM based video out.

The internal SCSI bus on the 8100 and Radius 81/110 (and Power Computing Power 80, 100, & 120) is based on an NCR 53CF96 and is Fast SCSI-2, which has a theoretical transfer rate of 10 MB/s. The internal/external SCSI bus on those machines comes out of the CURIO chip from AMD but is probably a 53C96 or 53C94 cell and is *unenhanced* SCSI-2, which has a theoretical transfer rate of 5 MB/s.

 

[rbbrchckn]

AACK!!! Having to back-pedal now, install an older OS. I (obviously) intend to run ProTools as well as getting Sound Designer II back up. ProTools will have to be version 4.2 so I may have to go back all the way to OS 7.6.1.

The SCSI info I was going from came out of everymac.com:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/radius/system/system81_110.html

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_wgs/stats/mac_wgs_8150_110.html

 

[rbbrchckn]

AAACK!!! part 2. I ended up having to go with OS 8.1 as it appears OS 7.6.1 only recognizes 2 gig or smaller. I also decided to pull the SCSI card as there seems to be conflict issues that I'm not really wanting to troubleshoot. I do still have a 9 gig and an 18 gig 7200 RPM drives, but now they have to use the 68-50 pin 'chokers'. The good news is I won an eBay auction for an 8100/80 board with all RAM slots filled and a nubus video card (NOT PDS), but now I'm back to AAAACK!!!

I'm debating whether to rip everything out AGAIN to switch out the motherboards as the Radius board is 36 MHz while the 8100/80 is 40 MHz. Still trying to find out for sure if the internal SCSI buss on the Radius is truly faster or not.

 

[Unknown_K]

OS 7.6.1 can only boot from 2GB partitions, but can use anything you have left for non bootable partitions. OS 8.1 can boot from larger then 2GB partitions.

The early PPC macs had issues on the nubus when using SCSI cards and any other card that did bus mastering (like video capture cards), so you are stuck with the internal SCSI if you want to do audio work.

 

[tom7447]

That's odd about the 2GB partition booting. My PowerBook 1400 is running 7.6.1 and has a 5GB drive in it (therefore partitioned to a single volume of 4.7GB). It boots up first time, every time :-/

 

[ojfd]

OS 7.6.1 can only boot from 2GB partitions, but can use anything you have left for non bootable partitions. OS 8.1 can boot from larger then 2GB partitions.

This is not quite correct. I have several PPC machines running 7.6.1 that boot off of a 4 and 9 gig drives. If I remember correctly, it was only true for 68k models (2GB limitation in ROM or something).

The early PPC macs had issues on the nubus when using SCSI cards and any other card that did bus mastering (like video capture cards), so you are stuck with the internal SCSI if you want to do audio work.

Also not quite correct. ATTO was a pain, but FWB Jackhammer (both Nubus) gave me no problems on various 7100/8100s with 7.6.1, AM II and/or Sound Tools+ 442. I haven't tested SampleCell or any video capture, though.

Drives were formatted with FWB HDT 2.5.xx or 3.x.x, can't remember

Here's one interesting excerpt from FWB FAQ re. Nubus Jackhammer that I saved many moons ago:

Can I use an array volume as my startup volume?

Yes, IF your machine has SCSI Manager 4.3 in ROM, you can start up from a striped, spanned, or mirrored array volume. Machines with SCSI Manager 4.3 in ROM include all Power Macintosh (and later) models (but no PowerBooks except the PB3400 and later models), Quadra 660AVs, Quadra 840AVs, and NuBus Macs with SCSI JackHammers (the JackHammer makes it appear to the system that SCSI Manager 4.3 is in ROM)

Note

If you have SCSI Manager 4.3 only by way of a Hammer Storage NuBus SCSI JackHammer card software, you can't array devices on the JackHammer bus with devices on buses without SCSI Manager 4.3 (in this case, for example, devices on the native bus).

 

[trag]

Here's one interesting excerpt from FWB FAQ re. Nubus Jackhammer that I saved many moons ago:

Can I use an array volume as my startup volume?

(the JackHammer makes it appear to the system that SCSI Manager 4.3 is in ROM)

I'd like to know how they did that. This would be a very convenient (probably essential) component in an IDE card for the old Macs. Also probably necessary for a USB card and anything else that can add storage. A fellow dropped in who provided some details in a thread somewhere around here many months ago, but I only understood about one concept in two of his explanation.

Note
If you have SCSI Manager 4.3 only by way of a Hammer Storage NuBus SCSI JackHammer card software, you can't array devices on the JackHammer bus with devices on buses without SCSI Manager 4.3 (in this case, for example, devices on the native bus).

But if you do have SCSI Manager 4.3 in ROM you can array drives on both built-in busses and on the JackHammer card. I had a four drive array with two Fast & Wide drives on the JackHammer, one narrow drive on the built-in internal SCSI bus and one narrow drive on the built-in external/internal bus. This was after I'd done testing and found that a third drive on the JackHammer didn't really add any performance, but the narrow drives on the built-in busses did. However, only one drive per bus added performance. A second drive on either of the busses or two drive on only one bus did not improve performance. That was in an 8100/120 clone. (PCC Power 120.)

The drives were all the same model (ST32550) just different interfaces (wide vs. narrow; ST32550W vs. ST32550N).

 

[ojfd]

trag,

That "Note" wasn't by me, it was in FWB FAQ. No reason to argue with me

 

[joeboy]

If you need more parts, I'll be glad to give you my Radius 81/110 sn JAE534014629S. But I need a favor. The video no longer works, probably due to the corrosion on the connector between the mother board and the upper of the two buttons in the right hand, lower front corner of the machine. The favor is a way to extract a few data files from the hard drive (ST34520N). How do I go about that?

 

[trag]

trag,
That "Note" wasn't by me, it was in FWB FAQ. No reason to argue with me

Oh, I wasn't arguing with you. I can see how my wording could be interpreted that way though.

No, I sincerely meant, that I wish I knew how they did that.

I've known since the days of the Turbo601 upgrade that the JackHammer has SCSI Manager 4.3 in firmware, because the Turbo601 did also and they conflicted. One had to disable it from loading on one of the cards (don't remember which one) in order to use a JackHammer in a machine with the Turbo601 upgrade.

I did read a section in "Inside Macintosh" which explained about CAMs and SIMs, and apparently what one would really need to do to make an IDE card work well on the old Macs is to write one's own stack of SIMs and CAMs, so that multiple disk expansion busses could be supported. Once one understands how, it's probably not too hard to do another one for USB, etc. but learning how to do the first one would be a doozy.

 

[yuhong]

If I remember correctly, it was only true for 68k models (2GB limitation in ROM or something).

Nope, Drive Setup in 7.6 and later installed the 'ruby' patch into a patch partition on the hard drive to fix this limit in the old ROMs that is loaded when the hard disk driver is loaded very early in the boot process. The PCI Power Macs and PowerBook 5300/1400/190 was the first Macs with large volume support built into their ROMs, and these Macs supported large volumes under System 7.5.x. Mac OS 7.6 backported large volume support onto all 68040 and PowerPC Macs (68030 Macs did not get this backport). You may be confusing it with HFS+, which was indeed only bootable under PowerPC Macs, probably something have to do with how the System file in the HFS Wrapper used to boot old Macs that do not have HFS+ support in ROM from HFS+ volumes was designed.