Resurrection of old macintosh g3 333mhz

[Santilli]

HI
My new school district is all macs.

So, to get things going, I brought out my g3, 33hmhz with 9.22, Cheetah 10x on an uw card, using an LVD cable, and termination.

I bought a Tempo 3 in one card. It has four fire wire ports, 2 usb external, and, it looks like two ide 133 channels.

Install card, dead machine, no boot. Switch slots, putting scsi furthest from processor, everything works fine. Don't ask me why. Just a guess from playing with PC's.

So, I reinstalled my mouse, and scanner, on the USB ports, and a La Cie
firewire, cd-rw for burning copies of programs, for class room use, and,
plus a scsi reader, external.

I ordered a LVD ATTO card, and, I'm considering ordering one of the 15.3K Cheetahs, 18 gigs, 3.6 ms, access time, for a boot drive.

I'm also wondering if anyone makes removeable ide drives that I could plug in, or, if I should just get firewire drives, and use those for data backup.

The grackle chipset limits the bus to 75 mbsec, about right for the new X 15, and the 32 bit/33mhz bus limits firewire to 40 mb/sec.

Another consideration is getting a raptor, booting os X, and going on from there. The problem is OS X may not support my scsi stuff, but, I think it will, with the ATTO card, and boot from the Sonnet, since I don't think the ATTO card is bootable in OS X, on a beige.

Any thoughts, comments, etc.?

Thanks

 

[Buck]

Nice setup.

For removable drives, you can always check Granite Digital. This way you can always configure your own stuff.

 

[Mercutio]

Is someone making a Mac-compatible SATA controller?

A brand new X15 for a G3 is probably overkill, but knowing Greg's position on IDE disks, I think it's better that way than dealing with the inconsistencies of the Raptor (the whole "some are louder" and "some are faster" issues that have no doubt been discussed to death on SR).

Kingwin just added swappable SATA trays for their removable hard drive bays. Firewire/USB2 enclosure + Removable Hard Disk rack = IDE drive that 's actually hot swappable.

 

[Santilli]

Mirror 1

The concept of buying a cheap, high capacity, low reliability ide drive for storage just doesn't make sense to me.

The only way I could see doing it, is, if the drives are dual, in other words, raid 1. Under softraid, I could raid two drives, each masters, on the tempo card, and backup to them.

I currently have room for 4 drives in my beige tower. First is the x 15 boot, second 18 gig Cheetah to backup, or, I could take it out, and replace it with a mirror of ide drives, hooked up to the tempo.

I just found out the card I ordered doesn't work with a beige, even though the designation is the same as the raid card I used to run in my beige :?: :evil:

That means I need a bootable LVD card for the machine, to run the X 15.

Miles 2 comes to mind...

gs

 

[CougTek]

Re: Mirror 1

The concept of buying a cheap, high capacity, low reliability ide drive for storage just doesn't make sense to me.

Greg spreading FUD again...

ATA drives are only low-reliability when you have a temper like mine. Otherwise, just sitting inside a computer box that's almost never moved, they'll last just as long as SCSI drives.

The classical 75GXP story will of course pop up once again here, but IBM made duds too with some of their SCSI drives, or so did I hear.

If you don't trust the regular ATA drives very much and fear they will die any second they are powered up, then just do like several of us and buy a model with a three years warranty instead.

SCSI is useful for several applications, but sitting inside obsolete Mac computers isn't one of these. We would put an ATA drive inside and tell you it's a new quiet SCSI model and you would feel the difference. Anyway, your box will eat the dust well before the new drive will, whatever its reliability is.

 

[Santilli]

I should be more specific.

Not scsi vs ide, but Seagate Cheetah's vs. IDE. I still have the 4 cheetahs, puchased in 1997, that were in the box originally.

They now reside as infrequently used backups for a raid box, on an old pc.

I've also had reasonably good luck with Quantum LM's.

Not so good with Maxtor's.

FUD?
How about that mac boxes are going to fail quickly? My school has a bunch of very old all in ones, from 1994-1997, and they are going strong, despite serious computer abuse by students.

I need storage for about 3-4 years, and buying a drive who's warranty runs out at three, is sort of like asking for loosing all my data.


Besides, you have to remember I was the one that said the IBM Deathstars were questionable, far before it was fashionable. I suggested people should wait, and see how they held up in the long run, because the numbers just didn't make sense. It's real rare for a device to come out, or a hard drive, that's both the biggest, fastest, and cheapest without something being questionable.

Besides, I didn't like the access times vs. the Cheetahs, and still don't.

I just bought the new cheetah, and found someone with old ATTO cards, LVD cards, that will give me 75 mb/sec, the same as the grackle chipset, and the Cheetah. Should work just fine.

The atto cards are 30 dollars each, I have an lvd cable and terminator in the machine, and the cheetahs 250 for 18 gigs.

Works for me.

gs

 

[Handruin]

I need storage for about 3-4 years, and buying a drive who's warranty runs out at three, is sort of like asking for loosing all my data.

When I buy a drive, I don't ever feel as though the warranty is any sort of guarantee of the life expectancy. To say you're asking for complete data loss means you expect the drive to last as long as the warranty. I buy the drive with the warranty to guarantee I'll have a drive working in my machine for 3 years, regardless if it is the same drive.

I don't even trust my SCSI drives at home since I've seen more Cheetahs die here at work than most people see first hand in their home. (I've even replaced several of them first-hand) All things considered, we have far more SCSI hard drives (Cheetahs) than most people so the failure rate would proportionally be higher. Point being, they're just as susceptible to failure as ATA drives.

I'm all for SCSI, but these days I need far more storage than SCSI can offer at a reasonable price. My opinion is to buy 2 cheaper ATA drives, and mirror them.

 

[Santilli]

Well, I have 10 students, and, as they work, I scan in everything they do, and have to save it for 3 years for a portfolio presentation.

I suspect that the wisest money would be a safe deposit box, and, as the 36 gigs of storage fill up, burning it to CD, and storing it in the safe deposit box.

I've also got enough zip disks that I could use those as well, for perm storage.

Any ideas?

gs

 

[Fushigi]

Whatever media type you decide on, make 2 copies and store them in separate locations. 1 set in a safe deposit box, another in a home safe. That provides protection against media defects/read errors as well as fire/theft/other damage.

Burning 36GB+ to CD kinda sucks unless you can compress it first. If you can't compress, is DVD-R a possibility?

I don't think you'd find many folks who'll endorse zip disks as a long term storage device.

 

[Santilli]

You've got a couple very good points.

Let's see.

DVD-r is a possibility, but not until they drop off the new item ripoff pricing list.

When they hit about 100-150, then I'll switch. The other problem is the media needs to be one everyone is using, and often with the parents I have, they don't have a lot of money, but that's not altogether true at this school.

I do like the idea of being able to trot out the CD's at an IEP meeting showing the work the child has done.


I'm going to do a search on ebay, and see if Jazz and zip stuff sells at a high enough price to be worth selling.


GS

 

[Mercutio]

I just bought a substantial number of Optorite (Sony) drives for $130 apiece. Newegg.

ZIP disks are the antithesis of a long term storage option. Zip disks are for data you don't like. Seriously.

For IDE, remember that you can get 3 80GB drives for the cost of a decent 36GB 10k SCSI unit.

That's a lot of backups.

My suggestion would be a couple of 80GB Samsung drives (the 5400rpm ones) and a couple of firewire enclosures. RAID1 'em. Buy another drive, use it for a hot spare, or configure it on another PC, elsewhere, to mirror or backup the contents of the RAID1 pair.

Total cost might be $350, but that's still not much money and WAY more reliable than any single drive solution.

 

[Santilli]

Problem is, the most likely problem I'm going to face is not the machine, dying, but having someone break in and steal it, though I think this unlikely at the school I am currently working.

The prices people are getting on ebay for jazz and zip stuff reflects it's value. It's not much, but, mine are still working, and, I could transfer all my stuff to PC using the zip, or Jazz drive transfer format, from school to the machines at home.

Perhaps the best solution would be a Friday backup, by CD-RW, and then rewrite it again until I'm on my next disc?

Firewire drives are another possibility.
Plug in at work, download info, take home, plug into another computer, and download on to another hard drive....

In that case, the Samsungs look pretty good.

Short term solution is going to be install X 15 on ATTO card, install os 8.6, I think, and use 10k for backup. Transfer data to some sort of media, either zip, jazz, cd-rw, or moveable hard drive, and plug in here.

I'm saving the data in bitmap format, so hopefully I'll be able to read it in both PC, and mac format.

Is zipping stuff effective at saving storage space? Does the unzipping work reliably?
How much space is saved using zip, and which program would you use?

Thanks

gs

 

[Pradeep]

The grackle chipset limits the bus to 75 mbsec, about right for the new X 15, and the 32 bit/33mhz bus limits firewire to 40 mb/sec.

FW400 is limited to 50MB/sec theoretical by itself, no PCI limitation required. Tho you really do want 64 bit slots if you are dabbling with FW800, most (all?) of the 800 controllers I've seen say they drop down to FW400 speeds when used in a 32 bit PCI slot.

 

[Fushigi]

Is zipping stuff effective at saving storage space? Does the unzipping work reliably?
How much space is saved using zip, and which program would you use?

The effectiveness of zipping varies by the kind of file being zipped. MPEGs, JPGs, and other already-compressed files won't gain much of anything when zipped since they are already compressed. Word processing documents, text files, and other non-compressed files can generally be reduced in size by 30-95% depending on the contents. If you have some files to use as test data, you can try zipping them to see how much they shrink.

Unzipping is very reliable; zip does not use lossy compression.

There are numerous zip handlers out there. I don't know Macs so I couldn't recommend one for that platform, but I know it exists. Zip runs on everything from PCs & Macs to AS/400s, *nix machines, and mainframes. There are other formats besides zip, BTW, like RAR, etc. On a PC I'd say grab WinRAR; I don't know if a Mac equivalent exists.