Cms scsi card

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inzgary's picture
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Cms scsi card

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?

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inzgary wrote:Hello I'm

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?

It is not sought after for a reason.

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Some people were fans of it

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.

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I have one- it works fine. 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.

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CMS SCSI Card

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. Smile

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

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Thanks for the input, I did

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.

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