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[FBz]

IIO recently responded to a firewire query here with a bit of a gem* that very-well describes a great deal of what often gets dealt with around here. (*Sublime and elegant in its’ simplicity.)

Especially considering the oft-heard lament, when dealing with oddball problems that crop up:
“It’s a Mac - it’s not supposed to be difficult”. (Until it is.)

I now propose, submit & respectfully offer - “The IIO Principle”… or the acronym EMILF (which has nothing to do with Electronic Mothers or sexual congress, per-se).
Of course, you may twist all that around as much as you like.

EMILF  “…Exceptions, Mysterious Issues and Lucky Finds”. - IIO
Many of you know all-too-well, exactly what this refers to...

When some-thing:

(1). Is supposed to work - but doesn’t.

(2). Isn’t supposed to work - but does.

Well… I think it’s much better than LUYB (Look Under Your Bed).


An EMILF Example (type #2):

Finally. Completely reassembled the first 867 DP MDD here with a transplanted 1.42 GHz DP CPU and placed two SATA drives inside. One, a Samsung conventional spinner and the other, an Inland SSD. And rather than using the accepted & prescribed MDD approach of IDE/SATA adapters capable of Cable Select jumper settings… I used two Bribges instead. One set as Master and the other as Slave (with it’s jumper removed). The Samsung had Tiger installed and the Inland had OS 9.2 AND Tiger partitions. Option-booted it and all three appeared as available.

Both available Tiger installs were bootable - the OS 9.2 partition was not.
[Flashing question mark, floppy icon.] Even though OS 9 appeared in the boot manager. EMILF!

But when I swapped the drives around on the ribbon cable (the Inland SSD with OS 9 - now in the Master position) it then booted into that OS 9.2.
(Not bad ehh? And not even a speck of profanity.)



Anything to avoid the overpriced StarTech, Addonics, (etc.) Marvell-chipped adapters! Even if Marvell is an American based (yet fabless) company. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/03/semiconductor-chip-shortage-could-extend-through-2022-marvell-ceo.html

Have another example of EMILF that perhaps you’d care to share?

Perhaps next week, we can cover the concept of frenemy?

Happy Monday y’all!

[DieHard]

I propose the FBz principle... TSASWS... "Throw Sh&t and see what sticks"

I have also been guilty of this approach, take new storage technologies and throw them in 15 to 20 year old G4s.

Even though this takes countless hours of trial and error, we have surely helped many who acquire these old units and want to know "how and which" storage scenarios will work and what direction to go for keeping these upgrades on a low budget.  It is important to keep in perspective that even the last MDDs made shipped with a 120GB mechanical drive and the unit cost was $2500 for the G4, we now have presented solutions that yield 256GB SSD Upgrades with adapters for about $40 ($35 + $5).  In the OS9 world this is a pretty awesome upgrade when you think about it

[FBz]

“The earth is flat Columbus. You’ll sail right over the edge!”

And “guilty”? You make it sound like a bad thing.
(Punishable perhaps with new discoveries.)

We’re doing pretty well though…
two new acronyms in one day!

There’s a bunch of rogues and misfits ‘round here.

HOME. Right?

[IIO]

after their complete disappearement for some 12 months or so i finally found some of these tantalum, i.e. liquid-capacitors-free JP-103-5 / EVB-002-3 on ebay, and today they finally arrived.

the layout is different from the other ones, but the components seem to be all the same. i could not yet read what the microchip says.

they were not much more expensive than what the other ones are atm.

highly recommended for MDD duals, sauna computers, texas, and other high temperature situations.

[IIO]

your new find is currently unexplainable for dumb people like us, but in regards to MacOS9 it does not change the old rule you once announced, right?

[IIO]

In the OS9 world this is a pretty awesome upgrade when you think about it

my first G4 was a PM7300 (which i later upgraded to G4)

its internal drive was 2000 mb.

my new 4TB disks are not only faster than the SATA bus, they now have 512mb cache. (8 times more than my oldest 2TB HDD)

i have a very specific use case here where i render video or audio from RAM using an app with no control over blocks correctly written onto disk. that bigger cache alone is worth getting one of these brand new HDDs, even if you can only use 2 TB of space with them. (only 1000 times bigger than in my first G4)

think about it: if i´d only use half of my RAM, such a HDD would provide almost the same performance than an SSD (which is 5 times more expensive) for that specific job.

[FBz]

Dunno IIO. Your “EVB-002-3” looks a bit taller.
But no matter, as you intend to place them all across the bottom?
Whereas I was going to try stacking them. (4 and 2.)

And as far as the “new find”… that’s in an MDD - where
before, Cable Select jumpers were thought to be necessary.

So maybe the Bribge does (or can) change that.
Will explore further, very soon.

*Quicksilvers are “Master / Slave”.

[IIO]

pardon, i had to edit my post.

the ones i usually have are JP-002-3 (which are also missing in your photo but seems to be almost identical), not EVB.

the size of these tantalum "powered" ones are somewhere between EVP/JP and bribge.

it sucks that they all have a different size. this makes it more complicated to build a 3D-printed enclosure for them.

[IIO]

found my mag glass. they are called U-003-H.

so say hi to U-003-H.

"hi, U-003-H!"

tanta powered but no master/slave jumpers. lol. good night.

[FBz]

Hello U-003-H.
Let us know how they work without jumpers in a Quicksilver “Master-Slave” environment.

And JP-103-5?

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,5436.msg39969.html#msg39969
Pull that “QC PASSED” sticker off and if it’s like the JP103-5, it’s not a JMicron / JM20330 like most of the rest of the green adapters. I don’t know what they are.

Und demander pardon… au contraire mon ami,
those two little holes marked SW1… are very likely jumper-ville.
(Marked as JP1 on the 44-pin adapters used in the Mac mini.)
Solder a wire between the two and you have a Slave.

G’night.

[IIO]

i dont think no master/slave jumpers means "CS only", it should work as master, but we will see after testing.

[IIO]

damn, now i know what you are talking about. head -> table.

as usual, since my 3rd birthday, i mixed up cable select and master/slave vs MDD and QS.

so my pictures are wrong (wherever that HDD thread is...) the "red" card is not needed at all, the minimum requirement for both the QS buses and the acard buses is of course: 1 converter with NO jumpers and one with M/S (set to slave)