Thinking about a Beige G3 - Questions

[boitoy1996]

You do realize that you just systematically tore apart my feeble attempt at defending SCSI?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Heh! Yep.

You've gotta admit it here. That SCSI is better, bigger and faster and higher quality mantra from back in the Mac/WinTel fanboy war days was misguided transference of the benefits SCSI had for high end Workstations where it was properly implemented to the underserving Mac. We've since seen that SCSI performance on the Mac was pathetic in comparison. For the IDE changeover Macs there was no performance or quality hit demonstrable. Such existed only in the blindered minds of reviewers and critics. Parity of performance was met at the start, even if IDE implementation in the Mac was worse than SCSI had been done originally.

edit: SCSI itself is still cool as hell though! Has anyone compared throughput on Mac Plus SCSI to 8-bit ISA from around that period?

 

[boitoy1996]

regardless, I want what I want because it makes me feel a certain way.  A highly decked out Beige G3 with a 15K RPM SCSI drive, Wings Card, FireWire Card, USB Card and SG-RAM upgrade to the onboard video, Zip drive, and DVD Burner would make me feel like a godess.  

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Perchance to dream  .  .  .  retro toys are all about chasing those feelings.

The Miata remains the most reliable, best performing, longest running, highest production classic roadster of all time  .  .  .

.  .  .  but it ain't no MG Midget or the E-Type of my dreams. s-i-g-h-! [8)]

 

[Compgeke]

It really doesn't help that something like their top end system, the 9600, only used a fast SCSI 2 interface, not even the wide SCSI 2 or better yet SCSI 3. 10 MB/s was the theoretical max transfer rate, which compared to ATA-66 was about the same. Had they went ahead and used SCSI-3 on the 8600 and 9600 it'd have been a far better love story. iirc the Beige G3 again was only SCSI 2, I don't have one to experiment with though.

If you really want SCSI in a G3, pick up something like a Powerdomain 29160 or an ATTO UL3D SCSI card. Not only are they bootable, they blow the doors off the pathetic excuse of onboard SCSI in the PCI macs.

 

[Brett B.]

Both of my G3s came with PCI SCSI cards and 4GB 68 pin drives.  First thing I did was dump that ridiculous trash.  I might have saved one of the cards, but regardless, myself and many others were sitting on a mountain of relatively large and mostly free IDE hard drives that were pulled from PCs.  Why would you NOT use better parts?  I have never seen any performance hit by going with IDE drives - the only limiting factor in data transfer on a beige G3 is the stupid 10Mb/sec onboard ethernet.  Ironically, both of my G3's also came with 10/100 ethernet cards... go figure, server model thing.

You have everything to gain and absolutely nothing to lose by not using a SCSI card in a G3.  The free PCI slot in itself is worth it, put something useful in it!  You only have three afterall.  

Not to mention that you STILL have onboard 50 pin SCSI no matter what and although it is slow, you could use a 50 pin to whatever adapter if you just simply must have SCSI devices.  But I've been playing with these things for almost 20 years now and I still don't see the point.

 

[boitoy1996]

I thought that IDE Devices on these beige g3 computers were limited to 8 gigabytes

 

[Cory5412]

A Mac OS X boot partition would be limited to 8 gigabytes, but if you don't install OS X, then it's not a problem. They will still have the LBA-48 partition.

An option of course is to put an ATA133 card into the machine for better performance. That might work around the 8-gig limit on the boot volume as well. I have to try installing OS X on a big partition on a SATA disk at some point.

For everything other than hard disks, the onboard SCSI bus is fine.

 

[Powerbase]

I thought that IDE Devices on these beige g3 computers were limited to 8 gigabytes

They could go to 128GB or 127 point something.  I think the 8GB "limit" technically could affect OS 9 too when a system file fell out of the first 8GB.

 

[Daniël]

You can also buy extremely cheap SATA cards from China on eBay, as long as they have a single SIL3112 SATA controller, it can be flashed on a regular PC with a PCI port, and then the card will work on any PowerPC Mac, sans the odd Quicksilver PowerMac G4 (those are just really picky with cards). Those cards are often $10 or less with free shipping, and the one I've been using in my PowerMac G4 MDD has yet to fail me.

 

[Zippy Zapp]

Good advice on the SATA card conversion although those SIL 3112 based cards are pretty sparse these days and no longer $10.  Usually $20 - $40.  I too prefer IDE but only because I have a ton of IDE drives.  SCSI drives are more rare these days, unless you go after a SCA 80-pin server drive and use a SCA 80 pin to 50 pin adapter.  Those server drives are built like tanks and have MTBF in millions of hours usually.  They are a bit loud though as they are usually 10k RPM to 15k.    I have plenty of dead quantum SCSI drives that were from Apple systems. One just died from a Performan 6116CD about a month ago.

 

[Franklinstein]

Beige G3s are pretty fun and, despite my love for the B&W, I find them to be far more reliable than the latter where, for example, one of the performance enhancements (the Ultra ATA controller) is eliminated due to a faulty controller chip and subsequent ATA mode reversion under OS X. I do really enjoy the B&W's processor activity LED, though. So cool.

My current beige G3 MT has an ATA DVD-RAM (yes, RAM, with the caddy-loading tray), 640MB internal SCSI MO, 40GB 7200RPM ATA HD, Voodoo3 3000, combo USB/FireWire PCI card, A/V personality card, Rev. B ROM, 640MB RAM, all on an 83MHz board run by a 292MHz G3. I have to run OS 9 because I couldn't seem to get the combo USB/FW card to run properly under 8.6. The only thing I'm missing is the Zip drive, because it isn't easy to find internal SCSI Zip drives just laying around (or indeed, at all anymore). The MO is more spacious and reliable anyway

I wouldn't bother with using a SCSI hard drive, really, unless you're doing some kind of disk-thrashing A/V work. With an internal Zip and optical drive you have only one spare drive bay available, so it's not like having the ability to install 14 more hard drives will do you any good; you're better off with SATA if you want a performance/capacity boost. If you're doing a file server (or anything on a network, really) you'll probably want to use one of your PCI slots for a decent Ethernet card anyway; the onboard 10bT sucks and I often have lots of collision errors with it on modern networks.

 

[Unknown_K]

I like the last generation 10/15K RPM SCSI drives on a decent card (you can run the 64 bit PCI cards in a 32 bit slot but you can only get 120MBs because of PCI bandwidth).  Built in IDE will limit speeds on newer IDE drives.

I prefer the B&W G3 to the desktop Beige G3 but I like the Beige MT G3s quite a bit.

 

[Daniël]

Good advice on the SATA card conversion although those SIL 3112 based cards are pretty sparse these days and no longer $10.  Usually $20 - $40. 

That must have happened relatively recently since I remember they still were that cheap not too long ago. I guess the SIL3112 chipset is deprecated and running out, with the SIL3114 being used as a replacement as I did see cheap PCI SATA cards with that chipset.

 

[just.in.time]

@boitoy1996What did you end up doing?

If you are still working on this project, just remember to take your time and all the right parts will pop up at reasonable prices.

If you haven’t gotten to the PCI cards yet, I put the following in mine:

Radeon 7000 MAC Edition 

USB2.0/FW400/1000mbit Ethernet combo card

SATA card

Im very happy with the build. And I did it incredibly cheap. (Unlike my 6100, which probably has $350 sunk into it -_-, all because I wasn’t patient)

Also, with 512mb RAM I’m seeing decent performance from Tiger on this computer. That said, it could never be a daily driver for me. YMMV. 

Best of luck!

 

[trag]

There are some SIL3112 cars on Ebay for $20 with the Flash chip in a socket, which can make things easier.  Searching on PB3112SATA150 will likely turn them up.  Looks like there aer 9 left.

 

[just.in.time]

Also, try to get a later logic board. They came with the Rage II Pro graphics instead of just the Rage II. Gejerally, these boards also had a REV B or C ROM, so you can cover both bases at once.