🚀 go-pugleaf

e4315555@student.uq.edu.au (Peter Naylor) writes:
>Well, the only experience I've had with SCSI on a PC was when I installed 
>a Sony magneto-optical and Adaptec controller on one of the machines at 
>work.  It certainly needed a "driver" type file, and it came with the 
>controller, not built-in.

Magneto-optical drives probably require a special driver (as do CD-ROMs,
by the way).  But traditional hard drives are handled by the BIOS.

>Having to include mounting brackets is rather silly... my machine came 
>with the brackets inside, so I don't have to worry about that sort of 
>thing, and it doesn't incur any extra cost on the part of the drive seller.

Actually, they don't _have_ to include brackets (and the most recent Mac
drive I bought didn't):  a running Mac already *has* a drive bracket, so
it would be perfectly possible to pop out the drive (I wish to repeat my
praise for the designers of the Mac drive bracket system), unscrew it,
screw it onto the new drive, and pop the new drive in.  However, it saves
the customer a good bit of time to have the drive already mounted, and the
cost to the vendor is not a great deal.

>I guess the main question is... are there any good prepping and 
>partitioning packages for the Mac that are freely distributable.

There are no really _good_ ones available free, in fact I'm not sure there
are any.  There used to be one (I've forgotten who wrote it), but it went
commercial.  (I don't think it was actively exterminated so much as just
allowed to disappear; it wouldn't be compatible with recent System software,
so there'd be no point now in archiving it...)

But the commercial ones are cheap, and (as I said) you get one "free" with
every drive you purchase from a Mac vendor.  And once you have purchased a
driver (either with a Mac drive, or independantly), you can use it on future
drives regardless of source.

>I can't think of a single thing that Apple could change in 
>the ROMs to improve the performance of a SCSI drive with their machines, 

They change absolutely nothing except identification.  (Well, on very early
Macs they also changed the SCSI reset / UNIT ATTENTION behavior, due to their
implementing a SCSI-2 driver before the spec was finished...)

>there are only two things I can think of that would justify that strategy...
>1.  To be able to charge whatever they feel like for a real "Apple" drive, 
>which is of course "special" for "special" Mac users...

This is between 99 and 100% of their motivation, that's almost certain.  It
is possible that they feel this is partially justified by their QA of drives:
you can bet that when Apple starts shipping a drive, they have tested a fairly
large number of units and are comfortable with their reliability and function.
(Check out comp.periphs.scsi for a report that a recent Quantum drive (Atlas?)
doesn't work right on the Mac unless you have the latest microcode ROM!!)
However, even their QA department is fallible (witness the famous stiction
problem of early drives, which to be fair bit _every_ computer vendor).

>2.  To inhibit the use of some SCSI functions and lock the drive into 
>certain modes, because of some inadequacies with the Apple SCSI controller 
>when it comes to certain standard SCSI settings.

The only change they've ever made, as indicated above, was to make drives
conform to what the SCSI-2 draft said about reset behavior, and they only 
did that until they started shipping new Mac models with corrected drivers.

>I'd be of the opinion that if a drive which adheres well to the SCSI standard 
>doesn't work with a standard Mac, with the standard system software (ie, 
>not costing any extra, PD is fine), then Apple has ripped you off when it 
>comes to supplying a SCSI interface.

Apple certainly ought to consider adding value to their drives to justify
their price, rather than a ridiculously ineffective effort to hold users
hostage.  Even the simple believe that the drive is slightly more likely
to be trouble-free is worth something to many customers.

At least you don't have to worry about whether or not two different drive
manufacturers' drives can be used on the same cable, like you used to (and
still occasionally do) with IDE.