Art wrote:
> This is just plain silly. I always thought a PCI card was a PCI card,
> and a Mac with PCI bus should follow the protocol, one would think.
SCSI cards are an exception. I'm not sure about other types of PCI devices.
As others have pointed out, it's partly because the cards contain an EPROM
that allows booting off SCSI drives (and a BIOS as well in the case of a
SCSI card designed for a PC), and such a boot ROM would need to be written
for a specific platform. But it's not only that, as even cards which do not
have any booting capability at all can still be incompatible across
platforms. The DEC Alpha platform uses PCI but is not compatible with most
PCI SCSI cards, boot ROM or not.
Related question: many of the Mac- and Alpha-compatible PCI SCSI cards have
the same chipsets on them that PC-compatible SCSI cards do (e.g. Adaptec
2940, Symbios 895). On cards without a boot ROM, I wonder what the
difference could be? What makes a card incompatible with a Mac if there's no
EPROM or BIOS? I am most emphatically not a Mac person, so I don't know.
> I'm actually surprised to here this. I thought the Acer was Mac
> compatible as it comes out of the box, and that would make me assume the
> SCSI card would also work.
The 2740 packaging is misleading in many ways. The box also claims that the
scanner is compatible with Win2K, and there is a Win2K driver for the SCSI
card on the CD-ROM, but if you call Acer you'll find out that they will not
support the use of their own scanner, their own SCSI card, and their own
driver on Win2K. Why provide a driver at all then?
Of course, these are the same support reps who didn't know what a SCSI
terminator was, and suggested that I change the scanner device ID to 7, so I
wouldn't look to them for any kind of SCSI support anyway. :(
Personally, I tossed Acer's SCSI card into the closet and hooked the 2740 up
to an Initio 9100UW card.
> I have four SCSI adapters in 2 different computers, and as much as I
> like what they do (and when they work, they work well) configuring them
> took years off my life I'm never getting back!
Don't get me started. I could tell many war stories about the SCSI problems
I've seen on everything from midrange HP and Sun boxes to workstations to
PC's and Mac's.
As you can probably imagine, I'm really pulling for FireWire to become
popular. Quickly. :-)
--
Todd Radel - thr@schwag.org
SCHWAG.ORG - Where Freaks and Geeks Come Together
PGP key available at
