What is better? hard drive or expensive CF adapter?

I don't think I can give advice on piracy, but I probably can say that OS X does not call home, and the family pack EULA doesn't cover machines that go away to college anyway.

Most (*almost all) Mac users who are aggressively against piracy, the type who freak out when I say I might not have paid for even the tiniest, most ancient bit of software, seem to turn the other cheek at EULAs that restrict you from using software on more than one computer, and will sometimes install the same copy of (for example) Tiger on eleven newworld machines they happen to have sitting around. (true story.)
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It's kind of hard to say what would be best. If you are thinking very long term, trying to go solid state is probably best option. I would search and read about the SCSI2SD product as it seems to be a favorable option and is slightly lower in cost than the SCSI - CF option. But you say your model is capped at 5--(MB/s?) the SCSI2SD will not go that fast, but you might not really notice.

Stick with old SCSI HDs (well that is what I do anyway).

I have been collecting for over 12 years now and have picked up quite a few spare IDE and SCSI HDs (some never used) for when the supply dries up. People new to the hobby will find it a little harder to replace worn out drives as the supply isn't what it used to be.

I do have some SCSI to IDE adapters (mostly 68 pin) but they remain on the shelf since I still have working SCSI. To be honest they seem kind of pricey when real SCSI drives are still cheaper to obtain.

The only cheap SCSI drives these days are large sized SCA drives from servers (have picked up quite a few 147GB 10k and 15K drives for under $10 shipped), kind of overkill but at least the SCA to SCSI adapters are only a couple bucks.

Nor does it cover work machines, or machines you let students use at a K-12 school, if I remember correctly. So it's only really worth it if you have a big family, 4 or more, all of whom will be using a Mac, at home, for personal stuff, concurrently.
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147GB won't be readable under System 7.x anyhow.  And if I chopped it into bunch of little partitions, even if I had a big 2 page display it still won't be enough to show all icons. 

SD option looks good since I can still get 2GB SD card for a few dollars. (my Mother once picked up about 50 of 4GB class 6 SD cards for only 2.00 each a couple years back, all tested passed with h2testw)

Yeah, SD media is pretty cheap. Like Unknown_K says, you can find slightly modern drives too. 68 pin drives may be a little easier to convert to 50 pin SCSI. Real HDs when they are working seem to be easier to setup, but most drives I run into are really loud so I prefer solid state solutions for a main machine. The SCA drives are fairly quiet though but can run a little hot. If you run something like System 7.6.1, maybe even 7.5.5, you can use the whole drive if it's large. I make 2 x 2GB partitions for booting/compatibility and then format the rest of the drive as a third partition.

In a IIfx, I'd definitely go for 3.5" SCA/Ultra160 and spend the extra money on a Fast/Narrow SCSI II (much more common)or FAST/Wide NuBus Card before THAT supply runs out or reaches stratospheric, SE/30 Card pricing.

Gotta prioritize and get while the gettin's good, IMO.

My projections for the situation:

I don't see server drives dying in droves under retro-use or the supply ever really running out. Prices will trend upward while the solid state converters will be trending down with each new iteration. It's the classic X graph for supply/demand pricing. Now is the sweet spot for the drives and we're far, not long past the sweet spot for NuBus Cards that obviate the bottleneck of Apple's sub-standard implementation of the SCSI Spec.

Can any currently available Solid State Converter match SCSI II data transfer rates anyway?

My personal experience with Tiger is limited on G3s to just the Pismo. It runs acceptibly there, but I'm not exactly impressed with the speed. Subjectively, I would say that Panter (10.3) was a little faster.

Peace,
Drew
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Incredibly short edit window limitation fixup:

In a IIfx or any machine with at least three NuBus slots (two with MoBo Ethernet) I see the choices outlined above as being close no-brainers, all things considered.

For your 610 however, that's a very tough choice considering the dearth of expansion capability. Personally, I'd worry more about the other machines in the lineup and chart the same course anyway, especially if you don't consider a more capable (not faster) NuBus VidCard a necessity.

I'm still using 10.3 on my Pismo, I don't really see the point in 10.4 at the moment, but it's not like 10.4 is impossible -- it was even usable on the Pismo. Although, it's a fast G3 with a relatively huge L2 cache.

On my G4 system, 10.4 felt, acted, and in general was much faster than 10.3 though.
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Well, you do not need to get a CF to have SSD on a Mac. For a little more than a 8GB CF with an IDE Adapter, you can get a IDE/PATA IDE, and connect that to the IDE to SCSI Adapter. KingSpec has 4 to 8 GB PATA-SSDs for under $30 on eBay. I recommend getting a 1.8in unit instead of a 2.5in as they are a bit less. It does not matter if it says its for a "Thinkpad 4-something" series, that particular ThinkPad only uses 1.8 hard drives and a 2.5in hard drive can not fit in it. Other than that, they are the same electronically and the IDE Connector on it is the same as a 2.5in. On eBay search for "IDE PATA SSD." Then it's just search for IDE to SCSI adapter to connect to it.

Problem with the 1.8in SSD - the screw holes do not line up with a 2.5in drive frame. So some hardware hacking is needed. I use 2-sided tape for that.

Ebay has some SCSI SSDs but at $500 plus each, that thing better serve me breakfast in bed and cut my toenails when they get too big!

Consider this as an option.

Trash80toHP_Mini said:

In a IIfx or any machine with at least three NuBus slots (two with MoBo Ethernet)...

Click to expand...

Still 3 if you get a MacIP AppleTalk to Ethernet bridge.

Well, Mac Centris 650 has 3 nubus slots and more upgrade option plus it's 25MHz stock, slightly faster.  Or 33Mhz Quadra.  But they are in larger box that won't have the same appeal as a size XXL pizza box.

Tiger is very fast on my G3, and there's no reason why it shouldn't be faster than Panther as it is more optimised code and the only new features that might drain performance, Dashboard and Spotlight, can be disabled if you like.

There is no serial number with OS X, so nothing to identify each copy even if it does talk to Apple (like in the OOBE sequence if you're online). I don't think it talks to Apple when you enter the iWork serial either, the serial is simply accepted by the setup wizard, and then it will only talk to Apple at the later point of running one of the apps for the first time and you choosing to register your details (presumably for spam, or so the Apple Police can come and find you if it sends the serial number back at that point and they find it's the same one that everyone else has) with them (you have to click "register later" about three times to get the option to "never register" - honestly, I can't imagine the outcry if MS were as invasive on privacy as this, sending your details to them without warning when setting up the OS, for instance!). Or at least I know it is possible to download the iWork '08 trial from Apple and then unlock it with any serial, regardless of how many times it's been used before (not from experience, you understand, I just, umm, heard this, umm, somewhere ).

Elfen said:

Then it's just search for IDE to SCSI adapter to connect to it.

Click to expand...

Do you know if these are easy to find for a decent price? I always seem to find they are close to $100. I know some people find deals, but I haven't had luck finding them. Anything over around $40 seems not really worth going this route.

O NOEZ!

It's not just about optimization though, even though Tiger might have more optimization, it's also got a whole heck of a lot more unnecessary stuff to make up for the "optimization." Even when they aren't loaded, dashboard widgets remain in memory, and the Spotlight, noble an idea as it is, really does reduce performance for those of us who are actually capable of organizing files on our computers properly.

And no, I don't want to spend any amount of time optimizing Mac OS X, I don't really think you should have to these days. So for me, it's 10.3 on the G3 system.
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There's an used one  on eBay, 68 pin SCSI to IDE. I was eying it but at about $70, I think I'll get the SD solution so I wouldn't need 50 to 68 adapter, and a cheap older IDE SSD (and one connector vs 3 connectors with IDE adapter = less headache if something doesn't work)

wilykat said:

Well, Mac Centris 650 has 3 nubus slots and more upgrade option plus it's 25MHz stock, slightly faster.  Or 33Mhz Quadra.  But they are in larger box that won't have the same appeal as a size XXL pizza box.

Click to expand...

Different strokes there, I'd be with the different folks. The XXWide 'zaBox is just about the most ungainly of form factors in my book, so of course I nave 1.5 with three feets total between them.

There's a PDS/Nubus hack floating around for the 610/6100 form factor somewhere on the web. Looked nasty even to me, but that box deserves a bit-o-the nasty. ;D

As I said, Spotlight and Tiger can both be completely disabled so that you benefit from the code optimisation without the extra overhead of the new features eg Dashboard can be prevented from loading completely so that there is no memory usage. I disabled Dashboard but kept Spotlight on my G3 and it works great (Spotlight doesn't seem to put much of a strain on once the initial indexing is done so I left it enabled - I even disabled the search indexing on my new C2D machine with Vista though, despite it being a very powerful system, as I so rarely use search in Windows and just don't need the indexing at all).
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Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

Just as a quick note on the server drives: Has anybody recorded the temperatures these things are reporting? The most modern server-grade stuff is really good up to about 80F or so (ambient), at which point you really do need to start cooling them. And that's with the number and strength of fans in a server, which doesn't care about how loud it is because you typically seal them in an environmentally controlled room.

Most 68k Macs just don't have the kind of cooling to support 10/15k server disks. (being smaller boxes and boxes designed for less airflow than a server.) 

Plus, as Trash80toHP_Mini pointed out, you must buy an outboard SCSI adapter to take advantage of even a morsel of the performance these disks have to offer. Apple never shipped very fast SCSI controllers and something like the CF AztecMonster adapter should be just about able to saturate the SCSI buses of everything up through the beige G3. (The beige G3 has fans, it may be able to support one 10k-disk.)

One of the things that has been discussed in the IRC channel lately is whether or not the AztecMonster is "worth it" when you can get the SCSI2SD for less money. The question is how you balance disk performance and your budget, because the AztecMonster is technically a better product that's faster, but Classic Mac OS (I'd argue all the way out through OS 9.2 for many workloads) is a lot less sensitive to disk performance than, say, Mac OS X is today.

For two reasons:

1. You're unlikely to be waiting on a Mac OS 9 or older computer to do your day job.
2. If you have enough RAM you're probably almost never swapping anyway, and Mac OS 9 doesn't randomly hit the disk for caching operations anyway.

So, basically you can afford to wait and and it's not like you were using the disk like RAM anyway -- places where putting some SSD chips directly onto the PCIe bus in the newest MacBook Airs made a lot of sense.

I'm personally likely to buy an AztecMonster in the near to mid-range future. My PowerMac 6100 and PowerBook 180 aren't really the ones that "need" it but I want to get my Sun Voyager going a little bit more quietly, and I figure eventually I'll have to open it to fix up the display inverter, etc. OpenSTEP is a little harder on the disk than classic Mac OS is, and this machine is a little bit more difficult to open up than the 6100 (and even the PB180) are.

I consider myself fortunate in that the disks I have now are in pretty good working order, but I definitely store all of my actual data from the PB180 and my PM6100 on a network file server. When those disks die, I'll be looking at SCSI2SD and AztecMonster as the replacements. The neat things about those solutions is that if you buy a 2 gig CF card and put it away until you need to replace your flash media again.

CF/SD media will essentially "keep" forever (whereas a spinning hard disk may actually fail in storage, until something really bad happens to it physically (or, say, ESD damage) or until you write to it a certain number of times. More and more modern SD/CF media is getting better at the write cycle thing too. (And of course normal SATA SSD grade flash media is getting to the point where you could write to it at full effort for 50 years and not wear it out.)

The fact that hard disks can fail in storage is one of the reasons many people consider tape and optical media where the data storage media is separated from the read/write heads to be a more robust solution for backup/recovery and archival than hard disks. Even expensive ruggedized hard disks such as RDX cartridges.

One more thought: It's really interesting to see what Macs people like and don't like, and for what reasons. I finally got my hands on a 6100 a little earlier this year and I've liked it a lot. It's a lot of stuff in a relatively convenient form factor, and I've sort of fallen in love with the 610 and 6100 from a "product" perspective because they did get a 5.25-inch bay in there (my 6100 has a CD-ROM drive in it), they had internal expansion available, but it was a successor to the LC pizza boxes in that it was sort of presumed you weren't going to go too wild with expansion.

I also liked the idea of the later 6000 series machines, let's just call it the "6200" and the "6400" even though of course the heritage is slightly more complicated than that. That always appealed to me firstly because it was similar to the SGI Indigo and Octane, and a few other UNIX systems based around backplanes. The other idea that I don't think Apple ever executed on but I thought would have been really neat for the era was for them to sell the motherboards separate from the rest of the system, so that you could hypothetically buy a 300MHz motherboard to install in your 6200 or 5200 after a few years. (which might have helped reduce some of the bad feelings some 5200/6200 owners have toward Apple for the level of the performance of those machines as they got on in age.)

This is out in left field, but even though it would have changed (or possibly made some options impossible) a few things, it would have been neat to see the 6100 use the same modular enclosure as the 6200 and friends, and for there to have been an all-in one Mac with a 601 in it, a "5100" if you will. The other neat thing that this particular modularity might have led to a G3 motherboard for the 5000/6000 family. (The other other thing I would have liked is for Apple to keep that desktop enclosure longer, maybe even instead of ever introducing the 4400/7220.)

Anyway, I actually like the 6100 a lot, both because it really feels "Apple" and because it was very appropriate for a time when Apple was working very hard to create a platform with a lot of choices, and the choices were the lightly expandable basic desktop, the three-slot midrange desktop, and the highly expandable tower.

</ramble>

Sorry, I meant to say Dashboard on Tiger. As long as you disable Dashboard then memory usage should be similar - Dashboard is a real memory hog if you leave it on though, each widget open runs all the time even when Dashboard is hidden and uses up its own slice of memory. Apart from the addition of Dashboard and Spotlight and a few visual tidy-ups (I much prefer the Tiger menu bar, for instance), I can't really see any major differences between Panther and Tiger, certainly nothing else added that could bog down an older Mac. Tiger seems a sensible choice though as it has a lot more support these days, and shouldn't die too quickly as Leopard is so bloated that there's going to be a lot of Tiger users left out there who can't upgrade. I've seen Tiger on a clamshell with 320 MB and it seems fine. Have you tried cleaning the favicons? (it was mentioned here once before as a way of speeding up Safari on an old OS X installation).
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Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)

There are plenty of 10K drives that do not get very noisy or too hot actually. Anybody who bothers to get 10k/15k drives would be better served with an external enclosure with its own PS and fan.

PS. for anything with a PCI-X slot there are tons of SCSI 160 and 320 adapters on ebay for barely over shipping. I have a few pairs of SCA drives in the bottom mounting of 8600/9600 machines and they stay cool enough.

My only problem with the "you can deactivate it" claim is that every time I've tried, nothing has come of my attempts to deactivate said things. Plus, why should I have to, in this day and age, go through with a terminal script to optimize my *Mac* ?

It's the main reason why Linux is unacceptable as a desktop OS for me. (that, and the lack of any real apps, like photoshop, final cut (or premeireprocs3/avid for windows) and inDesign, et al.

With the exception of my CS3 apps (which don't run in 10.3, and which I don't need on my laptop), the pismo runs everything I need, and the iMac picks up my creative apps.
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Just a note, the Family Pack does allow college machines:

That's interesting. Does your Console.app report a bunch of errors for the system trying to automatically start Dashboard?

Peace,
Drew
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Haven't noticed any problems at all. Not that there can't be any, but I sure haven't observed any problems. Only error messages in the console have to do with generic password in the keychain? Have no idea if they were there before, never look at the console.

My understanding of the family pack EULA is that it is for non-commercial use and the machines it is installed on must all reside at the same physical address. I seriously doubt, though, that anyone would notice if you had an illegal copy or else all the Macs out there sold on ebay with OS X pre-installed without a copy of the media would have been broken in an update by now.

No, it's just liscenses. Apple uses that nice term to make it seem friendly.
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Just to show something of Apple's evolution in terms of severity, complexity and eventual relaxation in terms of System/OS/Application licences, I quote:

1993: Z030-4611-A (System 7 Pro & PowerShare)
'You may use the Apple Software in a networked environment so long as each computer in such environment is the subject of a license for the Apple Software; however, you may not electronically transmit the Apple Software from one computer to another over a network.'

1995: Z030-6934-A, printed in U.S.A. (AppleShare 4.1)
'This License allows you to install and copy the Client Software for use on an unlimited number of computers in connecton with the network services specied in your Client Documentation.'

1999: ZM033-1365-B, printed in Ireland
'This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled or Apple-licensed computer at a time. This License does not allow the Apple Software to exist on more than one computer at a time.'

2001: 1Z033-1727-A and 2Z033-1727-A, printed in U.S.A., Singapore and Ireland (Mac OS X)
'This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. This License does not allow the software to exist on more than one computer at a time, and you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be used by multiple computers at the same time.'

2002: 2Z033-1965-A and 2Z033-1965-B, printed in Singapore and China (Mac OS X)
ditto

2002: 2Z033-2043-A, Addendum printed in Canada (Mac OS X)
'This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on up to a maximum of five (5) Apple-labeled computers at a time as long as those computers are located in the same household and used by persons who occupy that same household. By "household" we mean a person or persons sharing the same housing unit such as a home, apartment, mobile home or condominium. This license does not extend to students who reside at a separate on-campus location or to business or commercial users.'

2003: 2Z033-2301-A, printed in China and Canada (Mac OS X)
'This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. This License does not allow the software to exist on more than one computer at a time, and you may not make the Apple Software available over a network where it could be used by multiple computers at the same time.'

2004: 2Z033-2458-A, Addendum printed in Singapore (Mac OS X)
'This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on up to a maximum of five (5) Apple-labeled computers at a time as long as those computers are located in the same household and used by persons who occupy that same household. By "household" we mean a person or persons sharing the same housing unit such as a home, apartment, mobile home or condominium, but shall also extend to student members who are primary members of that household but residing at a separate on-campus location. This license does not extend to business or commercial users.'

2005: 2Z034-3166-A, printed in Singapore (Mac OS X)
'This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time. If you use Setup Assistant to transfer software from one Apple-labeled computer to another Apple-labeled computer, please remember that continued use of the original copy of the software may be prohibited once a copy has been transferred to another computer, unless you already have a licensed copy of such software on both computers. You should check the relevant software license agreements for applicable terms and conditions.'

Even The Clones of the 90s get a passing reference, but you will especially notice the softening of attitude towards students on campus.
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