scsi experiment
Remember the scsi vs ide debate. If you ever did music recording or video editing then you will. It still goes on. Back in the early 20001’s the powermacs were all scsi. I remember my old Akai s3000xl connected to my mac via scsi. But ide got better and was good enough. And I never really thought about scsi again. Until now.
I’ve been helping out a friend with what is now called a vintage mac. He wants to upgrade his whole system, but I suggested to try and upgrade a few parts such as ram and hard disk capacity to see how things go. When I downloaded the manual to his machine I saw that it was scsi and my heart immediately sunk. Terminators, scsi id’s and cable lengths etc etc.
So just to refresh my memory I read some articles on scsi before starting to look for parts for my friend. During this research I came across this article or series of articles. And they really got me going. He was trying to stand between the whole scsi vs ide debate and posit a compromise. That each protocol should be used as it was designed. Scsi for performance and ide for storage space. He also talked about a wow factor for heavy computer users who would notice a performance gain. You can read the articles for yourself here scsi boot drive articles
The idea was to put a small scsi drive in your machine for your os and apps and then put all the rest of the stuff on another drive, an ide one. So I went onto ebay and bought a scsi card and an 18Gb IBM ultrastar scsi drive. Had to find one that was 1″ thick rather than 1.5″ to fit into the caddies in my mac G4 dp. I went for something cheap so that I could test without losing too much money. But I also wanted something that would deliver. So I went for the lowest spec that was still at a faster bus speed than my current ide system.
In less than a week I had the parts for a total cost of less than £25. The first problem was that I couldn’t close the case one I had fitted the pci card as the internal connector pushed against the power supply. So I put the ribbon cable through an empty pci slot to plug onto the external connector. Normally the external connection has a slower bus speed, but was the same with this one and luckily the same number of pins.
So with the case closed I turned on the power and listened to the drive spin up to it’s full 10,000 rpm. My heart sunk immediately. But I persevered. I wanted to continue the experiment to see if I would experience the wow factor that I was looking forward to. Apparently like going from dial-up to broadband. I used Carbon Copy Cloner to put my os and apps on the new drive after formatting it and repairing permissions. Making it bootable of course.
Half an hour later the cloning process was complete and I was ready to change my Startup disk. The first boot was slower than expected but then it always is. I hadn’t moved any user accounts over to the new drive so I was back to square one with all my settings for my account. I wanted to point the account to the files on the other drive. So it took a bit more reading and research to figure that one out. Terminal and the sudo command. sudo voodoo And a bit of Netinfo Manager. Playing around at root level without backing up by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing.
I did get it working after a while so now it was time to put it under pressure. But I had a wedding to go to, so I left it till the next day. With no hangover I was up and experimenting. That noise again and then clacking, percolating hard drive noises which my wife described as early floppy disk when the drive was working. It was putting me off and no wow factor so far. Only noise factor and puzzles. What about her user account?
But there was a minor wow factor. There was some extra zip with opening apps. I double clicked on a file and in a instant the app had opened. And with apps that take a bit longer to open such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Logic etc there was certainly a bit of extra snap. I noticed a big speed gain with MS office for Mac apps and even with browsers. But the noise factor was too much in the end and brought the experiment to an abrupt end. Was it worth doing any further testing with noise levels such as this?
So what next? Should I try and get a quieter drive and have another go or should I forget about it? I’m not doing much music these days otherwise I would consider it and the quieter drive would be a must. But for what I do the ide drive is fine. I could do everything I do on a much lower spec machine, so perhaps the wow factor will have to wait.