Oxford 911 or 922?

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Level 1

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Oxford 911 or 922?

I've got a slot-loading 600MHz iMac G3 w/1GB RAM, currently running OSX 10.4.7. I boot from an external drive but the enclosure, which uses a Prolific 2507 chip, has given me problems to no end. I've read a lot of favourable comments from people here and other places regarding enclosures that use the Oxford 911 chip.

I'm looking to buy one of the Mercury Elite Pro enclosures from OWC, and the FW 800/400/USB 2.0 one caught my attention. I'll be upgrading my computer to a Mac Pro at some point, so Firewire 800 would be a useful thing to have for the future. However, the enclosure that offers all of these options uses the Oxford 922 chip (listed as 912 under the technical info, is this a typo?), which apparently had some known bugs with it under Panther. Do problems still exist under Tiger, or with older Macs like mine? My other option is the Firewire-only Mercury Elite Pro, which uses the Oxford 911 chip. By all accounts, this should work for what I'm after. However, I really like the extra port options provided by the other enclosure.

Should I go for the Oxford 922 (912?) enclosure, or stick with the 911?

iMac G3 600MHz Mac OS X (10.4.7) 1GB RAM | 120GB HD (Internal) | 300GB HD (External) | 400GB HD (External)

Posted on Sep 2, 2006 5:21 PM

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Answer 1

Dr. Smoke

Level 9

56,586 points

Sep 3, 2006 3:27 PM in response to TeamHCN

Hi, TeamHCN. Welcome to the Discussions.

I have purchased many FireWire (FW) drives from OWC and have never had a problem with them. I heartily recommend their products.

The Oxford 912 chip is the next-generation after the 922. It provides FW400 and FW800 support. You can read a brief flyer on it from Oxford Semiconductor here (Note: link is to a PDF).

The Oxford 911 chipset only supports FW400.

I've not looked into Prolific's chipsets, but you will note that the OWC drive you are considering uses the Prolific PL-2507 chip for USB support. If the problematic enclosure you are currently using with your venerable iMac G3 is a USB-only enclosure, I suspect the problems you are having with it are related to issues with stepping-down the USB 2.0 support in the enclosure to the slower USB 1.1 speed of your iMac's USB ports.

Start up from USB devices is unsupported for PowerPC-based Macs like your iMac.

Does your iMac have FireWire ports? If so, then you should be able to start it up from a FireWire drive using the FW400 ports on the OWC drive you cited. The FW800 ports on that drive should run at FW400 speed if you connect them to a FW400 port on your Mac.

Good luck!

😉 Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X

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