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Adaptec SCSI cards and G4 power down: a reply from Adaptec and others

Adaptec SCSI cards and G4 power down: a reply from Adaptec and others

CNET staff
2 min read
Thomas Schwab received the following reply from Adaptec regarding the "power down" compatibility of its cards (see previous MacFixIt item for more on this issue):
There should be no issues with sleep with any of our cards on G4 systems running Mac OS 9 or better. Our products should go in and out of sleep on the Sawtooth machines regardless of whether the cards have been updated to support Apple's "power management" feature that allows the "deep sleep". Those cards that support the power management functionality will fully support this "deep sleep". The cards that do not support power management will still sleep, but will not go into the "super low power" mode.

The cards that have been updated to support this "deep sleep" are the 2930, and the 29160N. Both of these have only recently been released, (or are in the process) so are unlikely to have reached the store shelves. Others are in process.

There is a problem in the Mac OS version that was shipped with the early G4s (not all of them, only a limited early run) where it would recognize the first SCSI card it saw in the machine as its own, and install a power handler for it. This could conceivably produce the behavior listed below, but we have not seen it. The earliest Mac OS to ship with the G4s was a "special" version 8.6. If you are running 8.6 on a G4, you may have this "bad" version.

The symptoms we see with this configuration is that the machine goes into "deep sleep" and never wakes up. It is not specific to our cards, and the fix is to upgrade to Mac OS 9.

Jim Mueller asked several SCSI card vendors about this matter. Here are the replies:

Adaptec said (appearing to partially contradict the above statement): "Adaptec said: Currently, we do not have any SCSI adapters/cards that will work with the Sleep Mode in the new G4 systems. This is a compatibility issue that Apple will be working on. To my knowledge, there aren't any difficulties using sleep mode in the G3 systems with our cards."

Initio said: Initio currently has no plans on rewriting the firmware to include the fix for the Energy Saving features on the new Mac machines. This may change in the future. Our adapters fail exactly the same as Adaptec's and ATTO's adapters when waking from sleep mode."

ATTO said: "At this time only our Express PCI-UL2D card supports the deep sleep mode. In the future others will support it."