nubus scsi card any benefit?

not really, have not seen them a whole lot.

However, I am a little annoyed at all the news coverage. It's like every little scrap of info is picked up. For example, TUAW.com (The Unoffical Apple Weblog) looks like it has turned into TUiW (The Unoffical iPhone Weblog). they dedicate whole gallery space to the contract, for example.

and yes, I do want one, but I won't be able to afford one for a while.

-digital

Yes, depending on the drive and model card.

I don't watch TV, but when I look at the macworld RSS feed, or the daringfireball.net RSS feed, it's almost all iphone-related.

I'm not getting one -- I don't even like cellular telephones to begin with, and I do somewhat wish that every other "industry analyst" would just shut up. Why oh why do I care that thirty different people, all of whom get their cash from Apple competitors anyway, say "the iPhone is gonna suck" ?

Whyyy???
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Until the Q950 and Q840AV, SCSI performance on the Mac was uniformly pathetic and only achieved "barely" acceptable in those models. I'd think even a standard SCSI card would blow the doors off the crappy implementation of SCSI on the Mac, so it certainly can't hurt to try!

Which Mac?

Is the card Fast/Narrow SCSI II or Fast/Wide SCSI II like the JackHammer?

Not seen any yet.

It would be going in to a q700. the seller gives the model number as MB-MIO-16X.

Ah, I don't think they're playing outside the USA. Even Canada won't have iPhone for at least another few months, January maybe?

But that just means that in Canada, England, Germany, Japan, et al there'lll be an epic-huge market for iphones, I bet. I can see it now. Somebody buys one iphone and can probably sell it overseas for enough money to get two or three more.
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Doesn't sound like a SCSI card part number, especially from NatInt. They made Digital I/O cards and the like for the Mac. If it's an IDC50M header connector like a MoBo or internal SCSI device that's sticking out the backplane, it's definitely not a SCSI card.

NatInt used that connector, but it's for hooking up all sort of lab equipment/sampling and digitizing analog inputs etc.

edit:

Bingo!

http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/320640.pdf

http://www.datasheetarchive.com/NB-MIO-16X/Datasheets-UD1/DSAUD003430.html

Sounds like a typo or simple mistake substituting an "M" for the "N" for the NuBus designator, but "MIO" would be NatInt's Model Number terminology for a Multifunction I/O Card.

Here are the official SCSI transfer rates for given Mac models according to Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA29470?viewlocale=en_US

Most of them really suck, of course, since many of them are based on the 53C80, this is no surprise.

Also, for the PB 500 series, when it says "Custom IC" they really mean it's a 85C80 derivative smashed together with the serial controller into one chip, probably to save space/money/etc...

For the PB 500 series, if one can get a Rev C card cage, your system will be far better off booting from a decent CF card than the internal SCSI Bus.

That is a data acquisition card not a SCSI card.

Paralel said:

Here are the official SCSI transfer rates for given Mac models according to Apple:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA29470?viewlocale=en_US

Most of them really suck, of course, since many of them are based on the 53C80, this is no surprise.

Also, for the PB 500 series, when it says "Custom IC" they really mean it's a 85C80 derivative smashed together with the serial controller into one chip, probably to save space/money/etc...

Click to expand...

Interestingly, the tech note doesn't mention the second Fast Internal Bus in the 8100.  Only the external/internal bus is mentioned.  The "custom" chip starting with the AV Quadras and running through the NuBus PowerMacs and on into the PCI PowerMacs is the AMD AM79C950 which Apple called CURIO.  It containsthe equivalent of a 53C94, an 85C30 and some kind of ethernet MAC.  It was a custom job from AMD for Apple and the datasheet is not available.

The 8100 was the first Mac with a Fast SCSI bus in addition to the regular slow bus.  While the Q900/950 had dual SCSI busses, they were both based on the 53c96.   The 8100 used the  53CF96 for it's internal Fast bus.

After the 8100, Apple switched to their "MESH" chip for the internal Fast SCSI busses in the PCI PowerMacs.  I suspect, but don't know, that MESH is really just a licensed 53CF96.   One of these days, maybe I'll try replacing one with the other to prove or disprove it.

actually, it already is. if you look around, you can run it in activated mode off a unregistered sim, and it acts like a 6g wifi iPod. the only thing that does not work is making calls, but everything else does. Browsing the web, watching videos, checking your email, etc.

-digital

I've never really understood this thing of being so impatient for the latest gadget that you would pay a lot more than it will cost when it is released in your country in only a few months time, for a version of the device that will never work as well as the cheaper country-specific one that you could wait for. Like when people pay huge amounts of money to import a game console when it's released somewhere else, only to then have a machine that will only play imported games and DVDs for ever, when they could have just waited a few months and got one a lot cheaper and doesn't require a lot of hassle every time you want to get a new game!
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trag said:

The 8100 was the first Mac with a Fast SCSI bus in addition to the regular slow bus.  While the Q900/950 had dual SCSI busses, they were both based on the 53c96.   The 8100 used the  53CF96 for it's internal Fast bus.

After the 8100, Apple switched to their "MESH" chip for the internal Fast SCSI busses in the PCI PowerMacs.  I suspect, but don't know, that MESH is really just a licensed 53CF96.   One of these days, maybe I'll try replacing one with the other to prove or disprove it.

Click to expand...

In discussing this with dad, is it possible to replace the 53C96 chip with the 53CF96 and automatically improve performance? Or does the ROM has something to say about the speed limits the buss can have? He has been wondering for months, what if he replaced the old slow 5380 from the old Macs with a faster chip like the 53C96. Pin to pin compatibility would be an issue but an adapter could fix that. But would ROM slow down the data transfers?

In the 8Bit days, dad has swapped out older 6502s from various machines with faster ones and managed to get some improvement out of the old machine.

Trag,

This is super interesting, but not surprising. You're not the first to have such musings! If one searches the mailing lists of the netbsd project and linux kerel there was much speculation about it. Since the two chips are so similar in package and driver spec, I'd say your hunch is right on the money. The MESH chip is likely a licensed and improved version of the earlier chip.

//wthww

jholt5638: Will switching to nubus scsi controller give any boost over the onboard one?

In my experience, the advantage of a NuBus SCSI card is firstly to give access to the very (well, relatively very) new SCA drives that are very large, quiet, fast and hot. As has often been discussed in these fora, many SCA drives will not work on an 8-bit SCSI bus. All Mac internal SCSI-buses are 8-bit. LVD-SCSI is 16-bit and it would almost usually allow the use of 146GB SCA drives. Such a drive is useful in Quadras and above, which can run Mac OS 8.1. Your Q700 mightn't be able to read a 127GB volume quickly, but with 8.1 it *will* be able to do it.

 The second advantage is speed. With the newer drives with their larger caches and faster spin times, 8-bit SCSI can access only so much data per second. 16-bit SCSI can access much more. Whether that is useful or not is another matter.

 As a matter of reference, I ran Speedometer 4.02 on my IIfx. The rating for disk for the 50-pin HD in there at the time was 1.3 while the equivalent rating for a SCA-drive with 80-pin-to-68-pin adapter connected to a NuBus FWB JackHammer was 2.8

I suppose so - I wouldn't even buy the first-gen iPhone at all, even a country-specific version at normal prices, given that the second-gen version will have all the inevitable bugs wiped out and most likely some of the key missing features added. Not that I will be buying one at all of course, but I'm talking about if I had that kind of money
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The FWB JackHammer ROCKS! I'ce got the PLI QuickSCSI NuBus card in the pet IIfx, never thought to test it against the JackHammer in the Radius 81/110 though.

Not sure I'd bother with it IRL because it likely (certainly?) requires NuBus 90 to give it free rein.

After the recap, gotta do time trials of both on both now!

Hm, as far as owning something before it comes out in your own country, (like Americans who want Japanese game consoles), it tends to be something that lasts a bit, because they want other games before they come out.

I suppose my statement about europeans and asians wanting iphones is somewhat unfounded, but I've already heard Canadians and others wanting iphones, and saying they might get one anyway, even in "airplane mode" or whatever. But I suppose I am not they, so I can't say what they want.

If it is possible to use ani phone without the phone functionality, I would be interested somewhat, but it's still just a glorified, way-expensive ipod nano, albeit with video functionality, a speaker, an included dock, a camera, and a few other advanced capabilities like wifi and web browsing.

What I'm interested almost more than the iphone itself is whether or not these devices will last long, and by that I mean -- whether or not you'll be able to use one without a contact for it's non-phone-ey things, in say, two or three years when people start dumping their old ones in favor of a newer one with a hard disc or better battery or whatever reason.

It would be cool, in say... a decade, to be able to say I have "The Apple Accessory" for my computer, just like at the MLA(both) it's cool to say you have a quicktake or a conferencing cam or a style/laserwriter or a powercd, etc etc. (hmm... Newton + QuickTake + PowerCD = iPhone?)

At any rate...
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I haven't seen a single iPhone ad yet, so i can't be sick of 'em.
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Lucky you. I have seen one or two just today, and I almost never watch TV. Plus, the people who are saying bad things about the iPhone just to get attention... and it didn't stop on June29th either... it continues and it's annoying.
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Maybe you can just be like me and not care. We don't have iPhone ads here, and i don't care because:

a) I'm in Australia
b) I can't use iPhone
c) I can't AFFORD an iPhone, even if i could use one
d) We don't have AT&T here
e) Even if we had AT&T here, i have no interest in becoming an AT&T customer
f) My VCR has this hot new feature which i believe is called a "fast forward button".


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