SCSI PC-card in Mac OS X/Classic

The Titanium has built-in Firewire which is faster than the PCMCIA SCSI.
That's what I'm trying to get at. PCMCIA based Firewire is not essential unless you are trying to capture video to an external drive. The way to get around that speed issue is just to get a larger internal drive. The Titanium will take up to a 120 GB internal hard drive, and larger if you don't mind this limitation:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86178

I would be suspicious of that. I remember reading lots of tales of woe with that and other SCSI cards under OS X. In fact, if you look at the OS X link on that page, it's a beta driver, released in 2002, never updated, and "This driver has been tested only with Mac OS X 10.1.3." That doesn't sound good at all.

The general idea I get from what I've seen on the Net is that there aren't any stable PCI/PC-card solutions for SCSI in OS X.

Instead, I've been using a FireWire-to-SCSI adapter, and it's worked with just about every old SCSI device I've thrown at it, from drives to scanners, with not even any fiddly SCSI voodoo required. The Mac even thinks it's FireWire, so you can hot-plug/unplug. I never want to see another SCSI card again.

That sounds like a great solution, N23. I may order one for myself, to connect my old Nikon film scanner to my Powerbook so I can retire the 9-year-old Mac clone that's taking up prime real estate in my home office, solely to serve as a film scanning station. I can't begin to justify the cost of replacing the scanner with a newer FireWire model, and I can't just let the old one go.

Before I got my Tibook, I used to spend as much time in the Powerbook G3 forums as I spend here now. When the Pismo came out without a SCSI port, there were lots of posts about the Adaptec 1480. Back then many people still had useful SCSI peripherals, and needed a way to connect them to the Pismo. The 1480 filled the bill nicely. But that was mostly in OS 9. OS X was barely half there (10.0 and 10.1 were essentially incomplete and unusable, and had no built-in support for SCSI). People who tried to use the 1480 with the very early versions of OS X were disappointed (or worse). I've heard little about it since then. If the Ratoc adapter works well in 10.3 and 10.4 with most devices, it's probably a better choice for the same or less money. Thanks for the heads-up.

That sounds like a great solution, N23. I may order
one for myself, to connect my old Nikon film scanner
to my Powerbook so I can retire the 9-year-old Mac
clone...If the
Ratoc adapter works well in 10.3 and 10.4 with most
devices, it's probably a better choice for the same
or less money. Thanks for the heads-up.

OK, well now that you've said that, I should say this. I am using the Ratoc to drive my SCSI Nikon film scanner from my PowerBook's FireWire port, and it took over from a 9-year-old Power Computing PowerCenter Pro Mac clone desktop that no longer boots reliably. Small world, eh?

One point with the Nikon: The NikonScan software does not support SCSI use in OS X for some scanners. Check your model against the current NikonScan documentation. It will not see my LS-2000 through the FireWire to SCSI connection. I have to drive it from VueScan, which has no problem seeing the scanner through the adapter. That's fine, because I like VueScan a lot. In some ways it is better than the Nikon software. If you already use SilverFast, I think it works through the adapter too, but I never used that expensive software past its free trial period.

I have used the Ratoc on 10.3 and 10.4, and I might have bought it back at 10.2 but can't remember.

I'd be perfectly happy using VueScan with my LS-2000, too. I've tried them out together on my PowerTower Pro running OS 8.6 and 9.1, and I've used a later version of VueScan with my flatbed scanner and Panther on my Tibook.

My PTPro still boots and runs like a top, but its time is past. When I got the Tibook, I still used the PTP once a week or more, but now I probably don't turn it on a dozen times a year. I'd like to reclaim the desk space for an Intel iMac or Mini pretty soon, and I think you've shown me the way.

Consider that has only 20 MB per second traffic, you
still twice better speed out of Firewire, and no SCSI
chains to fool around with.

n.b. If by FireWire you are talking about the Ratoc adapter, their page says the adapter tops out at 20MB/sec as well, as a limitation of the SCSI side of the adapter.

Hi, a. Those of us who have old, serviceable and very expensive SCSI peripherals like Network23's and my Nikon LS-2000 scanners might have bought FireWire peripherals instead — if any had been available when we were buying. None were. It may make more sense to us now to invest $50-$100 in the ability to keep using those peripherals at the speed we're used to, than to spend thousands of dollars on FireWire devices just to get higher scanning speed. I know that's true for me, especially since being able to connect my scanner to my Powerbook with a Ratoc adapter, despite being limited to 20 Mbps, would give me a huge improvement in speed over the 5 Mbps SCSI-1 bus my scanner is now connected to. Of course it remains to be seen whether the scanner can actually acquire data as fast as 20 Mbps in the first place — I don't know the answer to that.

Well now you can get slide scanners for $100 if you shop around. My HP Scanjet 3970 has a built-in slide mount which goes into the lid of the Scanjet. Never used it, but it is there as a feature. The chances of it being supported in the future are greater than adding adapter after adapter. And many old scanners simply aren't supported anymore in drivers.

a: It's quite true that you can scan film for $100, and you generally get what you pay for: uneven illumination, poor dynamic range, crummy color, and scanner surfaces and the dust on them being pressed against your film. Having paid $2000 for the top of Nikon's line several years ago because it gave superior results, I'm not yet ready to trade it for a five-and-dime scanner. It's certainly true that quality comparable to the LS-2000's is available for less now than it was then, but as long as I can keep using my LS-2000 for $85, I feel no temptation to spend $500-$1000 more just to get the same image quality a few seconds faster. Time is not of the essence for me.

Obviously there may come a day when adapting the old scanner to a newer Mac no longer works, and just as obviously, it may some day be possible to match the image quality I'm accustomed to at a price I'm happy to pay. If the two things coincide in time, I'll buy another film scanner then — if I still need one. The longer I can use this one and the more of my old film images I can scan with it, the less likely it becomes that I'll have to replace it with anything else in the future.

Yeah, eww speaks for both of us. I paid around $1200 for this pro-level film scanner and if there's any way to run it until it dies I will do it. Only now are the $500 flatbeds approaching the film scanning performance that dedicated film scanners have historically achieved.

Scanning does not require top sustained throughput. In fact, NIkon switched to USB 2.0 for their film scanners. The bottleneck in scanning is the scan time, which, if you want a good scan, involves high resolutions and multisampling, which all takes significantly longer than the occasional task of moving the data to the computer.

HI, bipp, and welcome to Apple Discussions. I haven't used one, but Adaptec says the 1480 will work:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/mac/scsi_power/APD-1480/

Not the 1460, though.

Consider that has only 20 MB per second traffic, you still twice better speed out of Firewire, and no SCSI chains to fool around with.