Hello I'm looking to hook up a scsi hdd to my apple iigs. I am considering a cms card because they seem half as sought after by collectors as the apple cards. The drive I'm hooking up is a quantum hdd in a hobbyist's scsi enclosure, which I've never seen before but it powers on and does its self test just fine. Would a cms card be a good option?
Anonymous
User login
Please support the defense of Ukraine.
Direct or via Unclutter App
Active forum topics
Recent content
Navigation
No Ads.
No Trackers.
No Social Media.
All Content Locally Hosted.
Built on Free Software.
We have complied with zero government requests for information.
It is not sought after for a reason.
Some people were fans of it but I wouldn't buy one myself. I've used one but I prefer all the other SCSI cards over it.
I have one- it works fine. It allows for multiple ProDOS partitions and you can choose which one to boot from, which is a nice option. I think it also allowed for HFS partition(s) in GSOS, but it's been a few years since I booted it up and played with it.
It's perfectly fine if you can find old working SCSI drives, but that in itself is a challenge, as most surviving drives are large-capacity 80-pin server drives from the 90's and early 2000's.
I used one some years back, and while they are a bit quirky, they work perfectly fine.
There are two main releases of the ROM for this card and I would highly recommend using the later firmware as it gives you a lot more flexibility. IIRC the early version of the ROM has hard coded partition sizes - I *think* it just splits the hard disk up into partitions of 32Mb and a further partition of whatever remains after that.
The later firmware has more configuration in the ROM - you press a particular key to get to the configuration menu (sorry I don't remember the details). From memory, I think you can custom partition the hard disk using this ROM.
One other thing: there is a driver for GS/OS that allows you to have an unlimited number of partitions - I remember having something like 25+ partitions at one stage. It was painfully slow on bootup as GS/OS scanned each partition.
It was incredibly difficult to find this driver, in fact some illuminaries in the community doubted it's existence, but if you (or anybody else) wants a copy, I *should* be able to dig it up again.
Cheers,
Mike
Thanks for the input, I did end up going with a CMS card with the 1990 ROM. The ebay seller was able to tell me that he performed a full test of the card. It seems to be working fine for me. The HDD gets recognized by the card as 234 MB + 118 blocks. I just had to format the drive before the Apple would do anything with it. This ends up being 8 partitions with only 2 being active at a time with the standard system software. I can also use the CMS SCSI utility to change the activated partitions with GSOS running no need to reboot.