Quad G5 vs SCSI

Ok this one is driving me nuts, here I have one of apples last G5 based powermac, at a little over a year old its still a perfectly good machine, the problems started when the need came up to hook up a SCSI scanner to this thing

One of the more annoying apple mistakes was the removal of SCSI from just about everything they make. Now while this may not sound like a real disaster, to those of us who own older technology scanners, it’s counts as bad, real bad.

Yes these things may be old but they are solid, fully functional and do all I need, so what’s the point in upgrading. The solution, drop a SCSI card into the powermac, after all its got PCIx slots, so why not use one of them. How hard could it be to find a card, just wander down to the nearest apple store?

OMG, how wrong can one get, so far I have tried just about every supplier here including the apple stores, and hammered the internet trying to find a card, that was basic, did not cost more then the machine and scanners combined, that someone could actually sell me.

In my area there are a number of apple stores, so as expected they where my first stop.

The first one, looked at me like I was speaking some form of alien language, and then tried to sell me a new machine, which BTW, did not have a SCSI card.

Ok, so this was just a case of a store trying to talk me into spending a truckload of money, right?

Er, well so I would have thought, but no, the next store was even worse than this one.

This time they actually knew what a SCSI card was, but told me that no one used anything SCSI anymore, and I needed to replace the scanners, and yes, they just happened to have several in stock. Funny that….

Now getting more than a little fed up with the whole thing, I gave up and hooked up the scanner to a Linux machine (which has a scsi card), and did the scanning I needed without any problems.

That was that, well for a while anyway. After a few months I needed to do some more scanning, and this time the Linux option was not going to cut it, it needed the Mac, or to be specific its software.

Feeling more than a little optimistic at the prospect of trying to buy a Mac SCSI card, I had no real choice ☹

This time the first port of call was one of the largest apple centres in my area. Anyway, after waiting far too long for a staff member to actually pay attention to a customer walking into the store, he went through the usual “this is too hard a question” stuff, another staff member heard the conversation and took over.

After quite a while searching the internet, a card was found, the problem was it was in the $1000+ range, and clearly was intended to drive hard disks.

Still no luck, I left my details, and was promised a call back, when they found another card

Yes, you guessed it, no call back, and that was several months back

After this, as expected, the thought of more of the same of other apple centres was not something to look forward to. Rather than use up more shoe leather, time to hit the phone book.

Calling another half dozen apple centres, plus several of the larger general computer stores, the result was zip, zero, nothing

Not wanting to import something from overseas, the Internet option was something to be left as the last resort

Oops almost forgot, in my wandering around various computer stores, I ended up in a camera/digital imaging store, and while they could not help me, their tech did mention a converter to let me use my SCSI scanners as firewire devices.

This sounded too good to be true, but with nothing to lose, time for some more googling.

It turns out these things do exist, they are made by a crowd called ‘ratoc systems, which is all well and good, except they are overseas. Time to locate someone in this country who sells these things.

After extensive googling, nothing, not a sign of anyone in this country who has even heard of these things, let alone sells them

And yes, I have emailed ‘Ratoc’ asking who sells these things, but as yet no good from them either.