LVD-SCSI-RAID-Cage 6-in-4-dual-channel

Trash80toHP_Mini

Trash80toHP_Mini

NIGHT STALKER
68040
AOPEN BPL6 - 6-in-4 dual Channel RAID (level?) Cage
Gray SCSI RAID Cage.jpg

Now, how to use it with a MoBo in the range between 8600 and the B&W G3? I need recommendations for a PCI Card running under 9.2.2?
$38 shipped for a color match (fingers crossed) isn't toooo bad, but if it's off a bit I can always use it in another application. I've got a four drive cage in black with dark gray flippers that might turn out to be more appropriate anyway. Colors chosen to be complimentary are far better than near misses.

 
I assume the (Level?) is a question as to what raid level the cage supports? Internally it doesn't support any, it's just a backplane, any RAID functionality would be dependent on the controller it's connected to. Googled up the manual for it and it looks like the backplane is split into two groups of three (thus the "dual channel" claim) and it came with a jumper cable to tie the two halves together if you wanted to run it on a single port. For a while I actually had the motherboard that was apparently often paired with the case this fit, and it had an Adaptec AIC-7899 controller in it that appears to be the functional equivalent of the PowerDomain 39160, so I imagine that's probably the ideal card to work with it. If the compatibility information here is correct that rules out working with anything less than a B&W G3.

 
Thanks, eudi, that's excellent news! The MoBo in that Magic Plastic Hack Drawer (Right above PEx in a Drawer) just happens to be a B&W G3.

And now to source that interface card. [:)] ]'>

 
Did you just buy one of those Dell cards to use in your B&W? Because it isn't going to work, certainly not out of the box. Some *similar* PC cards can be grudgingly convinced to take a flash of the Mac firmware but it depends critically on the hardware version and is therefore a non-trivial process.

 
Has to be a PowerDomain specific card.  Adaptec SCSI cards are intentionally crippled to keep Mac users from using the cheaper PC cards.  You might be able to flash it with a PowerDomain firmware, but unlikely.

 
Dang, new it was too good to be true, that's why I ran it past you guys before buying!

I don' be flashin' nuttin' never! ;)

edit: one of these (might have been two? Dunno, gotta search the misc.goodies) came in the four drive cage, so I'll be bottom feeding Quantum Atlas 18.2 GB 3.5" Ultra 3 Drives in the TN18Lxxx series for quite some time. No hurries, no worries, The drawer has been slowly filling over several years and time is on my side.

Of course a cheap lot of ten or so of another drive might be a better deal, SCSI3 is SCSI3 so long as I don't need to SCSI1 support for the other toys.

 
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Sweet, which RAID levels does it support? We'll see what eudiG has to say, but I have my doubts. I might just take the fancy backplane off one of the cages so I can cable up a JackHammer based NuBus RAID. Who needs hot swap drive arrays for HobbyMacs anyway? :lol:

 
Trash80toHP_Mini said:
Sweet, which RAID levels does it support? We'll see what eudiG has to say, but I have my doubts.
Click to expand...
I'm no expert in Macintosh SCSI cards specifically, but my inexpert opinion is it's probably just as likely to work with the backplane you bought as the Adaptec card is. (In fact, there seems to be some noise out there that the ATTO cards are more reliable for MacOS, OS X at least, than Adaptec cards are.) To my mind the only wild card really is whether that backplane depends on something external from the case it was designed to fit, but the manual I found on it makes it at least appear it's self-contained.

Note that so far as I can tell neither the PowerDomain card nor this ATTO card have any built-in hardware RAID support; when running on a PC the ATTO has some built in *software raid* support, in the sense that it has BIOS support for recognizing RAID containers so they can be booted from, etc, but all the RAID processing is handled by the host CPU and requires a driver that includes the RAID support. It looks like ATTO *did* offer a product called "ExpressStripe" that included a RAID 0/1 driver for early versions of OS X and an extension for accessing striped volumes under OS 9, but these RAID containers don't appear to be bootable.

If you're looking for a plug-and-play hardware RAID solution for OS 9 I honestly don't know of any "intelligent" RAID controllers to plug directly into Macs. (Such things do exist for PCs, I used have this ridiculous huge card that was equivalent of the built-in PERC raid controllers on Dell servers, I honestly can't recall if it was Adaptec or LSI.) If what you really want is a hardware RAID that offloads the CPU overhead for disk management you probably need to look at an external chassis with an intelligent controller. (Note, however, that those things usually use IDE or SATA drives internally, SCSI is used for the array-to-host link only. Ala, things like this.)

 
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There used to be an article or at least some daily reports of converting the 39160 into a PowerDomain on xlr8yourmac.com. At worst it involves replacing the flash chip with a larger capacity one. Usually, those were 32 pin PLCC chips.

 
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I recall converting a 2940 to a PowerDomain 2940. I did have to replace the ROM Flash chip, which IIRC was a DIP chip so it was fairly simple.

 
I converted a lot of 2940 without having to replace any chips. Just poppep them into a Mac, ran the Adaptec firmware update utility and the cards were PowerDomain afterwards.

So it seems that some PC cards already had a ROM chip that is ok for the Mac furmware as well.

 
Back in the day I looked into trying to flash the Open Firmware BIOS onto the 2940 I picked up somewhere for free, and in that case I did run into the "too small EEPROM" problem. The trick with the 2940 is it comes in a vast multitude of variants, some of which will, as noted, just flash right out of the box, and others that need to be hacked on. (And of the ones that need to be hacked there are versions with either PLCC or DIP chips, and there are even non-bootable OEM versions that don't have a ROM at all.) Given how cheap proper Mac cards are on eBay (the premium for one over a similar PC card seems to be $10 or less if you dig) I can't really see the value in messing with converting a PC card unless one just drops in your lap.

 
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