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| Author | My 7500 got recapped ... (Read 113983 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
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on: October 25, 2024, 09:17
Good news just arrived here. The service recapping my 7500 has sent me an e-mail - it's on the way back to me. I'm now awaiting the mailman in order to have real 7.6 hardware again. Talk about excitement! :-) The 7500 board has quite a number of caps more than most average Macs according to the tech. I know it has much more than my IIci for example. Still, the invoice is 100 euros for recapping the board and checking + cleaning the PSU (which I had sent with it). If you do the math on what soldering equipment + time would cost you to do it yourself, I think this is a very fair deal. Apparently, my 7500's original PSU is working absolutely fine, no leakage, all values fine. According to the tech, he thinks the caps won't be the problem on the board but rather it's "mediocre production quality". According to him, due to the construction of the power supply, the board is bending over time. He assumes that this will eventually lead to micro cracks which will kill the PSU - and not leaking caps. We shall see. I'm wondering what solution to go with in terms of a hard disk. I don't want to use the 7500's original hard disk again. While it still works surprisingly fine, it's just about 200 MB and simply too small. I have a spare SCSI2SD v5 lying around, but I'm not sure if it won't be the bottleneck in my mid-range PowerPC. I'm under the impression that it + BlueSCSI rather cater to 68k hardware, but I'm not deep into writing speeds etc. What are ya'll using in yours these days? |
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nulleric
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8 MB  Posts: 10 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #1 on: October 25, 2024, 15:06
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> BlueSCSI rather cater to 68k hardware BlueSCSI v2 will max out that 10MB/sec bus if you use FWB Hard Disk Toolkit's drivers with it. Another option if you're just looking for raw speed is to grab a $6 SATA card, flash a Mac bios to it, and get near 40MB/sec with a modern HDD. HTH, -Eric
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mac-cellar
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128 MB Posts: 176 Gotta love System 7
Reply #2 on: October 25, 2024, 21:00
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I use BlueSCSI v2 with a PowerCenterPro. I've had no issues.
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snes1423
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256 MB Posts: 458 A Man born of Mechina
Reply #3 on: October 26, 2024, 02:43
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i personally use a old IDE-based 4GB HDD with my PDQ running 8.1 see here http://revontulet.org/2024/10/26/eac509d1f1cd4001b935a3404943891a.gif
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #4 on: October 27, 2024, 14:58
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Thank you guys and especially @eric for the numbers! 10 MB/s sounds pretty cool. It's the limit imposed by the SCSI controller ? How do 10 MB/s translate to actual performance on the ground? Am I right in guessing that anything SD card based is running circles around an old 90's HDD?
Last Edit: October 27, 2024, 15:01 by Bolkonskij
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #5 on: October 27, 2024, 16:24
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10 MB/s is about what I generally get when transferring files to and from a USB 2 thumb drive. It is typically adequate to run a live OS image and with persistence it can be used to run an OS from a USB thumb drive. Generally speaking older systems with their smaller data file sizes and application sizes will preform very well with 10MB/s. 10T ethernet and Wireless B were as fast at data transfers as old SCSI hard drives. A 14.4bp/s modem transfers data faster than a floppy drive. If you have enough RAM a RAM disk can be created to overcome bottle necks in drive performance.
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nulleric
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8 MB Posts: 10 System 7 Newcomer!
Reply #6 on: October 27, 2024, 16:36
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10MB/sec is "Fast SCSI" - and you'll get no faster on a stock PowerMac with built in SCSI. @Wove - have to be careful in your transfer comparisons - eg: 10baseT is 10 mega bits per second - which is 8x slower than 10 mega bytes per second. I also think floppy's were much faster than a 14.4 modem - which is why we always used sneakernet back in the day 
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #7 on: October 27, 2024, 17:42
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I was just talking of general practical usage. One should always be leary of specifications and their theoretical speeds. In the case of USB 2, it is very rare to see a device transfer data at more than half its rated speed. Even today, I tend to keep most of my data on networked storage and pull it in as I need it and write it back out to network storage when done working. For most of my use that make no noticeable difference in system use. Try it, you can pull 200K over a 14.4 modem connection faster than you can pull it off an 800K floppy. I never really used floppies. Serial cable two Macs together and instant network, log into the server using the ClarisWorks comm module and transfer over what you need. Floppies were for Commodores, and PCs, the sophisticated and modern Mac had little need for them.
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lauland
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512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #8 on: October 28, 2024, 04:25
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I've used Sonnet PATA and SATA cards in my 7600, and have been quite happy with them.
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ShinobiKenobi
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256 MB Posts: 362 System 7 fan
Reply #9 on: November 19, 2024, 22:35
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That's awesome Bolkonskij. I hope it works great for you for a long time.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #10 on: November 21, 2024, 08:29
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Well, I finally got mine back. Unpacked the parcel yesterday evening, things looking good on a first glance. Haven't had the time to clean out the case and piecing everything back together - that will probably have to wait until the weekend. But super excited about the prospect of getting my 7500 back already
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ShinobiKenobi
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256 MB Posts: 362 System 7 fan
Reply #11 on: November 22, 2024, 06:43
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Awesome to hear that! Can't wait to hear how much better it runs.
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #12 on: November 22, 2024, 08:08
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I actually got around cleaning the case and putting everything back together yesterday. Unfortunately, in the process a few plastic clips broke off... this mid 90's plastic is getting *very* brittle now. So had to use some tape to e.g. fix the light in its position But we're talking cosmetics here. After assembling everything back together, the 7500 came back on, but unfortunately I got screen artifacts. Narrowed it down to the VRAM and probably more precisely its slots on the logicboard acting up. Eventually, after some cleaning and moving of VRAM sticks it came back with a clear picture. My problem now lies with the CD-ROM drive that doesn't do anything. It used to work perfectly fine but it sits there dead in the water, e.g. doesn't come on at all, pushing the open button doesn't open the drive etc. I've checked twice if I connected both the data and power cables to the logicboard correctly and they sit firm. At this point I wonder if I may have a SCSI ID conflict since I've moved the original 240 MB hard disk out and replaced it with a spare SCSI2SD which I had previously used in my IIci. The SCSI2SD comes with a microSD which has 3x 2GB partitions. In Lido they show up with SCSI IDs 0, 1 and 2. The CD-ROM drive isn't shown at all. I wonder if one of the partitions is conflicting with the CD-ROM drive's SCSI ID (#2 getting double assigned or something). As I get time this weekend, I'll pull out the old HDD and plug it in for a test to confirm (or not). Otherwise I should have a spare CD-ROM drive somewhere. Because while the floppy drive works, I'm not too keen to copy over and manually install 7.6 by juggling what feels like 5843 floppy disks 
Last Edit: November 22, 2024, 08:12 by Bolkonskij
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Bolkonskij
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Administrator 1024 MB Posts: 2023
Reply #13 on: November 28, 2024, 15:40
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Still battling the beast :-) So, I swapped the CD-ROM drive and it's working again. I installed 7.5.3 from the original discs that I've got. Quite unstable experience. Well, 7.5.3 was known to be a buggy release, so I went and updated to 7.5.5 (thanks to Knezzen for helping me to track down a German 7.5.5!) Well, things didn't improve much, still got lockups. No good. I went and ran GURU's RAM test. Oh, it almost instantly fails. Aha, so we've got a RAM problem. Threw everything out and started adding individual modules, starting with the 32 MB one. Got it up to 64 MB RAM with two modules, both passing the RAM test. So things should work more smooth now - only they don't. It isn't as crazy crashy but it still locks up or displays a blinking bomb modal. This happens especially during Finder copying, so my next guess was that the SD card in the SCSI2SD was maybe on its way out. It had served years in the IIci before. So I downloaded FWB HD Tools 2.x and initialized 1 out my 3 partitions. After doing that, I went and started copying over the System Folder to the newly formated volumne so that I could later format that volume too. Well, turns out the 7500 didn't take it so well - it hard locked up about 15-20% into the process. Darn. I wonder if it's 7.5.5 that is so crashy, it's the German localized 7.5.5 that makes it crashy or if I have another hardware issue. PSU was measured and is giving good values, board was just recapped. Very odd behavior still. I wonder what it could be. Welcoming any ideas For now I think I'll try installing 7.6 or even 8.1 on the newly formatted partition and see if the problem persists, which would probably point into the direction of a hardware issue.
Last Edit: November 28, 2024, 15:42 by Bolkonskij
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wove
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1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #14 on: November 28, 2024, 18:56
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I never had good luck with the 7.5.x series of releases. I tried the releases as they came out, but none of them were very stable. For my 68k machines I stuck with System 6 or 7.1. For PPC machines 7.6.1 is the cat's meow. Of course when your language has words like . Kraftfahrzeughaftpflichtversicherung you may need to consider moving to a 64 bit architecture machine to handle it.
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