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Adtron SCSI Compact Flash drive?

olePigeon,

That's the 2.5" to 3.5" adapter I have as well. Check the connection orientation with the pictures I have on the previous page. I plugged it in upside down the first time I tried it. I don't recall it saying it was empty though using a 512MB card. I DO get that issue with the 16GB card in Micronet but I'm guessing it's just too big for the firmware. Could this have anything to do with the speed of the CF card? My 16GB is 266x. NJRoadFan's 8GB was 133x. How big/fast was your card?

BTW, thanks for testing NJRoadFan. I've got some cards coming and will test it out. Is there a Mac specific benchmark I can run on a TAM?

 
I'd have to check. Does TechTool Pro have any benchmarking? The main reason why I used a PC is that I have modern IDE controllers for them and that I could benchmark "bare metal" in DOS. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple's "braindead" IDE implementation on the pre-G3 Macs is about the same speed as an ISA card. I picked up the Transend 133x since folks said they were a "safe" bet for compatibility. Performance as a HD replacement in Pentium/PPC era systems is a bit lackluster though, particularly the write performance.

 
I am going to go with the Transcend 8GB Ultra Industrial CF cards. Let's see if those work once I get them.

@Trash80toHP_Mini, it is the only Mac with an external SCSI port that is sitting in my living room :)

 
I've run into an interesting problem with my Adtron. I can power it up, and it gives me the flashing question mark. Doesn't matter if I power it down and then back up again, restart, etc... it won't see the drive. Now, if I pull the power cord, wait 30 seconds, then boot, it will find the drive, and I can restart no problem, it will find the drive, but if I power down, it will lose the drive again, and I have to pull the power cord, and again, it will find the drive and boot. The behaviors are perfectly repeatable, I've tested it about 10 times now.

Has anyone seen this type of behavior before? Is it the Adtron? A PRAM issue? An issue with the HD driver? I can't seem to figure it out. It's not the SCSI cable, I've tried two different ones, and it's not the machine, I've tried two completely unrelated logic boards.

 
What I'm experiencing is obviously an idiosyncratic phenomenon resulting from either a faulty unit, or an unfortunate combination of software and hardware that doesn't want to behave. That's why I was hoping someone had seen this before in another context, so I can narrow down the cause.

 
The adtron does not use 12 volt power at all. If your using an adapter for 3.5 desktop use try pulling the 12 v lead.

 
The behavior has become completely unpredictable.Now restarting always fails and pulling the power cord doesn't work, but doing the 4-key shutdown and then power on a variable number of times causes it to work.

Does anyone have any clue what could be causing this kind of unpredictable/erratic behavior? If the CF is formatted incorrectly would the problems be more predictable, or would it be erratic like this?

I might have to try another flash card and see if that helps with this issue.

When it fails to load, if I boot from Floppy and probe the bus, it says "Device Not Ready!" and reports a completely incorrect size for the CF installed (Something like 728 GB). Would an adapter do something like this if the CF card itself was the trouble?

 
Well since we are all pretty new to this card and your the one having the problems, I would guess anything is possible.

Just like finding out I need an older driver for mine if I want to use it in a 100.

 
I can't get mine to work no matter what. It always says it can't detect capacity, or, says the device is not ready. I've tried it across different computers using different cables just to make sure, same result. :-/

I'm using the "Team" 2GB 133x card that was posted earlier.

 
Ok, so far, I've learned a few things that will hopefully help other people here. It appears you can't use two cards in this adapter unless they are literally identical, as in same brand, same capacity, etc... otherwise the adapter reports a medium incompatible error.

Also, apparently it is very picky about which compact flash cards it will accept. Now that I have swapped out the transcend for the sandisk all my problems have disappeared.

 
I just tried mine on a Mac. Patched HD SC 7.5.3 won't see it at all. FWB HDT Primer 1.3.1 and SCSI Director had no problem seeing it. Formatted it with HDT, installed System 7.1 and tested booting with no problems on the Macintosh Portable.

 
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