Wanted: Maxtor/Beige G3 Drive Temp. Comments: [Chad posted in the forum thead his Beige G3 MT temps with the 40GB Maxtor - 91 degrees F max so far he says (using a thermometer wire attached to the drive). I don't consider that temperature a problem as it's below your own body temperature.] A few readers have asked how warm the Plus40 drive runs inside a Beige G3. There's a thread in the G4 forum where a reader says he was told by a Staples employee that the drive overheated his PC (hard to believe). The drive does not seem to run any hotter than the 27GB versions I have here and shows no sign of problems from extended use in the B&W G3 or in the Firewire/IDE case. Chad Mathes sent some benchmark results with his Beige G3 system and I've asked him to comment on the drive temperature. I'd personally not hesitate to put it in my Beige G3 MT (the drive there mounts above the power supply) but I can't say how the desktop units are arraigned and welcome any Beige G3/Plus40 owner comments. Since the 27GB and 40GB drives seem to run the same temperature in my observations, 27GB/7200 RPM owner comments are also welcome.

If you're looking for one of the Maxtor Plus40 40GB drives, a reader says his local Costco had them for about $280. They seem to be sold out everywhere.

MacOS 9.02 Fixes iMac DVD Audio Sync, Improves Networking: A post in the G4 Forum notes that MacOS 9.0.2 solved not only DVD lip-sync issues but improved networking as well:

"MacOS 9.02 is here
Posted By: Skillet
Date: Sunday, 27 February 2000, at 12:42 a.m.

I work for an Apple reseller. We just got our shipments of the new configuration G4 machines, which ship with MacOS 9.02. The installer CD from these machines, will work as a MacOS 9.02 updater as well as a full installer. We installed the newly updated MacOS 9.02 on an iMacDV SE and I thought I'd share some of the benefits we have seen.

First, the DVD lip sync problem is GONE - Matrix played PERFECT, as well as other DVD titles. The choppiness of the video when you try to use the pull down menus while a movie is playing, is still there, but who cares, as long as the movie plays the way it should, crisp, clean, and with the words coming out of the actors mouths. Best I've seen when it comes to software decoding.

I also noticed that OpenGL is now up to version 1.1.3. This does not seem to have any real impact on Game Performance, the FPS in Unreal and Quake are about the same as before the upgrade.

Lastly, one thing I will say, is it seems as Apple must have tweaked some of the networking part of the MacOS, as after the update, some of the sluggishness of us running Dave 2.51 - which connects our Macs to our Windows98 machines for file sharing, is working must faster then before.

Anyway, anyone else have any good or bad stories surrounding OS 9.02?? Post them here. "

I think OS 9.0.2 also includes DVD player 2.1 (not available to the public yet). I wonder if OpenGL 1.1.3 has any further Altivec support (which would only show on a G4 system).

After reading a new TIL today on Appearance control panel sound tracks causing pops in DV Audio with iMovie, I wrote Jeremy to see if this tip would fix his Pismo PB DVD audio popping noted earlier today:

"Mike,
Had platinum sounds enabled. Turned it off. No effect, still pops.. It's not regular, either. It happens somewhat regularly, but not on any sort of time table or anything. I also just let the menu sequence of The Matrix play over and over and it does not pop at the same spot in the playback each time. I just tried increasing the memory allocated to Apple DVD Player and that had no effect, or turning off virtual memory.

By the way, the pops aren't always the same volume.
Jeremy Hansen"

DVD Audio Pops Not Just On Pismo: Note the issue may not be Powerbook related, as another reader noted similar pops in DVD movies on his G4 system after applying all the recent updates:

"I have a PM G4 400 AGP with DVD 2.0, audio 1.3 and QT 4.1. I too have experienced the exact problems of Jeremy. I noticed that the Incite Halo movie has these problems too (it is an MPEG).

[he later added]
I should add that i think it started after getting QT 4.1.
Colin Jackson "

Barney Buoy sent a list of Net News/TIL Updates/Software Updates.

After getting the Software Update 1.1.1 Jeremy was able to download the Sound Manager Update for on his Pismo but reported it did not help the DVD movie audio pops/crackles he noted earlier today.

"Got the new Sound Manager.

Here's what I found - the Sound Manager didn't make any difference, and headphones don't make any difference. I tried changing some of the audio settings in DVD Player (pro-logic, enable line mode) and no difference. I didn't find anything in Sound Manager worth noting, either.

So, it still pops. It only does it during playback. It doesn't during pause or fast forward.

Still haven't tried a quicktime file yet. Part of me wonders if it's a decoding glitch that's in there to keep the audio/video sync'd.....
-Jeremy"

As noted earlier, he said games audio seemed fine and this is the only Pismo report like this I've had. It may be just some quirk is his particular machine but I welcome other Powerbook Firewire owner comments on DVD Audio.

More 2930/External Drive File Copy Problems: Another reader replied to the earlier post on problems copying files to an external SCSI drive attached to a 2930 OEM card, saying he's having copy errors to an external Jaz drive. I've asked him for more info (Mac model, OS version, Iomega driver version).

New G4s w/2930 Have v4.2 ROM: I updated the 2930 ROM/Sleep post below to note a reader reported his new G4 with BTO 2930CU shipped with the 4.2 ROM and will go into deep sleep mode. He's using only an external CDR and scanner but said he sees no messages on PCI cards not being able to be powered down when he awakens the machine.

Pismo DVD Audio 'Crackle': [Update: another reader noted that the Pismo doesn't ship with the latest Sound Manager version which might help. As I noted here last week, the Software Update v1.1.1 Control Panel had to be used to 'see' the update on my G4 and iMac DV here (earlier versions would not show all updates available). Jeremy said he will try this and also verified the pops/crackles seem to only happen in DVD movies, saying that Unreal Tournament audio was fine.] This is the first complaint I've heard on the new Powerbook Firewire (Pismo) audio so it may not be common:

"Mike:
There's something funky about the Pismo DVD playback - the speakers make a crackle sound every few seconds upon playback. I haven't tried minimizing extensions or anything yet to see if it has anything to do with that, and I haven't tried headphones yet, but it's annoying.

I started The Matrix last night and came back near the end of the movie and the audio/video sync was spot-on.
Jeremy Hansen "

If welcome other Powerbook Firewire owner comments on DVD/Audio.
The review Pismo 500 has not arrived yet, it should be here next week.

Adaptec 2930 ROM Update and G4 Sleep Mode: [Update: Peter Plank replied to this post saying his new G4 ordered during MW Tokyo has 2930CU ROM v4.2 installed] Avelino Santa Ana Jr. wrote regarding a ROM update for the 2930 (coming soon) that is said to enable full powerdown in sleep mode (Note - I'm not sure all disks/disk drivers will spin down):

"I sent a message to Adaptec with the following message:

The system will not enter deep sleep (pulsing amber power light mode). I read somewhere that some people have been sent a new ROM chip to fix this. Is there a ROM upgrade available?

I received this message this morning:

"The v4.2 ROM chip will soon be available for release. Please send us your shipping address so we can send it to you as soon as that happens.
Thanks for using Adaptec's ASK Us System." "

This ROM update service may only be for the retail cards (not sure if Adaptec will send them to owners of OEM cards). The 2930's ROM is not flashable like more expensive models, which is why it requires a ROM chip swap for a firmware upddate. (UPDATE: Although v4.2 ROM for the 2930 supported deep sleep for year 2000 G4s, in 2003 a Quicksilver G4 owner said he needed a 4.3 ROM chip update to allow deep sleep in his Quicksilver. See the Jan. 24th, 2003 news page for that report and links to Adaptec's tutorial for swapping the ROM chip in the card.)

OEM 2930/Plus 40 Copy Problems: Speaking of 2930's, a G4 owner wrote he's seem problems with copying files to a OEM 2930 connected external drive from a Maxtor 40GB drive. He's the latest mail from him (my questions are in italics)

"DiamondMax Plus 40 on G4 with Adaptec 2930 scsi problems?

What other internal drives do you have?
internal ATA 2 ID=0 Quantum FireballP 19.14GB (OEM), ID=1 Maxtor 38.16 GB
internal ATA 0 ID=0 DVD-ROM drive (Matshita)(OEM), ID=1 Iomega Zip 100 (OEM)

If you have another IDE drive - are copies from/to those OK?
Yes

Are copies from the cdrom ok?
a test 65MG copy from the CD to each of the internal HDs AND to the external HD works fine. When I try to copy that same 65MG folder back from the external HD the finder hangs.
A 100MG folder copy between the 2 external HDs works
A 100MG folder copy for one of the external drives to the Maxtor works

OEM scsi card or a retail model?
(OEM) PCI-slot B ADPT 2930U

By the way, the 2 external scsi drives are narrow drives (scsi II?) attached to the 2930 thru an OEM adapter.

I think I have isolated the problem to one 3GB harddrive and did a complete low level reformat of that drive. I was able to copy a 130mg folder to this harddrive but copying FROM this drive to the internal drive still hangs.(The good news is that the Maxtor startup disk is so fast that from hitting the forced restart button thru the automatic startup disk firstaid scan to system bootup is only 100 seconds.)

Also I haven't had to zap the pram each time (as I thought necessary previously) with this round of forced restarts.

This problem drive has active termination (APS) turned on and is the last physical device on the scsi chain. The problem is somewhere in a bottleneck in copying from this particular drive.

Maybe my next step is to fiddle with different scsi termination and or scsi ids?
The id of this drive is 3, the only other (good) attatched scsi drive is at 6. "

If any other 2930 SCSI card owners are using a Plus40 drive I'd welcome your comments on how the combination is working.

So far this is only one of two problem reports so far with the Plus40, the other being an odd case where one owner reported the drive formatted to only 32GB in his G4 running OS 8.6.

More on Cheap White Box PC 39160s: In a follow-up to the Tuesday news post from Tim on flashing a PC 39160N (dual channel/64-Bit Ultra160 SCSI card) with the Mac 39160 firmware, I asked him for more info on where he bought the OEM PC model:

" I got it for $235 (before CA tax and shipping) from Multiwave Direct (www.mwave.com). Shipping was about $10.

When I was looking for prices, I couldn't find any prices better than $200 for the 29160N OEM and $235 for the 39160. 35 bucks for a second channel was too tempting to pass up, plus it's a 64-bit PCI card so I can feel like I'm actually getting something from having 64-bit slots. :)

There is also the 29160 (no N) model, which is 64-bit PCI and has a 68-pin LVD external connector. Since there is no equivalent Mac model I was hesitant to try it -- the Mac firmware might not have full support for it.

BTW one thing I found out is that the 39160 does not have SpeedFlex, unlike the 29160 models. There is a 50-pin header connected to one of the channels, but if you use it that whole channel goes down to SE mode instead of LVD.

[I said] BTW - Computergeeks.com has 18GB 160M OEM Quantum 10K drives for $369. (Only 90 day warranty though)

Yeah - I am waiting for the new not-quite-out-yet 10K II model though. It's faster, but more importantly I'm trying to keep noise down, and according to Quantum's specs the new model should be a bit quieter.
Tim Seufert "

Plus40 in Beige G3 Performance: A reader writes that the performance of the Plus40 with the Beige G3's onboard ATA/3 controller closely matches the results I saw with the Firewire/IDE case (which also has ATA/3 interface):

"Mike-
I just wanted to let you know I finally got my hands of a 7200rpm 40GB Maxtor. Went through hell and high water to get it, but I did. Anyway, you were correct about the beige G3 have ata/3 that maxes out at 16Mb/Sec. I am very pleased with the drive, and it is just a hair faster than my OEM scsi 9gb. The scsi sustained 11-14 read and write, and the Maxtor sustaind 14 or so read and 15 or so write on all of my partitions. The 40GB maxtors are also very quiet! Are the 10gb diamondmax/diamondmaxplus drives about the same at the 40gb's noise wise? anyway, if you would like, i could email you screen shots of the benchmars in whatever program you like. that way you can post an article on what beige owners can expect. i was hoping for 25+mb /sec, until i read that the clubmac box does 16mb/sec and is similar to beige g3. oh well, still more than satisfied even though $324 was a little much. Thanx for all the info on the drive subject lately!
Chad "

The $249.99 Plus40 sales sold out stock everywhere it seems since many stores were price matching. I paid $299.99 initially for mine at BestBuy but they later refunded me the $50 difference from the CompUSA sale price. The Plus40 seems almost impossible to find in stock at the current time.

Western Digital IDE Drive Jumper Settings: A reader notes some tips for those installing a Maxtor drive as a slave to a Western Digital (many G4 systems ship with WD drives):

"Mike-
All is well, finally. After much troubleshooting, I finally was able to achieve proper results when testing the Maxtor drive in the G4. There are a couple issues that I think other readers should be aware of when using this drive with G4's that have the WD102AA 10BG harddrive. [Also applies to other WD models-Mike]

The jumper settings on the [WD] drive need to be changed when installing a second ATA drive. Infact, owners should check to be sure that there are 2 jumpers installed on the factory drive. On mine, there was only one. How foolish of me to assume that OEM drives would come with the proper number of jumpers.... [Some models of IDE drives have a single drive setting that is different from the 'master' setting (sometimes called 'master with slave present' in the past).-Mike]

There is a page on WD's website that has diagrams of proper jumper settings in various master/slave configurations. The link is: www.westerndigital.com/service/FAQ/jumpers.html

...The read/write results I achieved are almost identical to yours, so I haven't included them. If you would still like to look at them, then I'll send them along.
Doug Shugarts "

More Rev 1 B&W G3 IDE Drive Reports: Adding a new drive to a rev 1 B&W G3 always runs the risk of the data corruption issue (especially with a slave drive which was not officially supported by the IDE chip on the motherboard). Here's the latest report from a rev 1 B&W G3 owner:

"Here's some info on the current crop of Maxtor drives and a Rev.1 B&W.

I wanted more space so I got the 20.4GB 7200RPM Maxtor Diamondmax Plus drive from Staples.com (with a $30 first-time shopper coupon and free shipping) for $129. I originally got a Turbomax card to run the Maxtor, but when I finally got around to installation, I got curious as to which controller was faster and what combinations were possible. MacBench seems to indicate that this drive performs marginally better on the internal (built-in) controller, so I decided to make it my boot drive on the internal bus.

Curious as to whether I could get my data from the stock drive to the Maxtor without messing with the DVD-ROM (and whether I would see the data corruption issue or not), I set the Maxtor up as a slave to the stock drive. I've tried the .smi data tests and everything. So far not one single problem (been running 24/7 for two weeks).

One interesting note: the System Profiler tells me that the vendor of stock drive is "IBM (for Apple)". For the new drive it says "Maxtor (for Apple)". Might this be in any way related to the fact that the Maxtor drives tolerate slave mode on a Rev.1 B&W? One wonders...
B. Alexander King III, Ph.D.
Department of Physics"

Sean Barley noted he's using the Plus40 in his Rev 1 B&W G3 as a master (no slave drive) but he's puzzled on the lower read than write rates (according to FWB's HDT 3.x). Read/Write sustained rates were pretty close in my tests in a rev 2 B&W G3 as shown in the Plus40 review.

If there are any other B&W G3 rev 1 owners using the Plus40 drive please let me know. (Note if you're using it as a master or slave drive and if you have ran the .smi file checksum tests noted on the B&W G3 rev 1 slave drive article.) I'd also welcome any Turbomax and Plus40 owner comments on performance.

UT Expansion Pack Unzip Tip: [Update: Joshua wrote that the Stuffit solution is to set the 'Cross Platform' prefs option to 'never'.] Eli Block wrote:

"Stuffit likes to decompress zips as text files when it can..it will make the UT ".umod" file into a text doc that "UMOD Installer" which comes with UT does not take to well to. My fix was to use MacZip [Freeware - see this page-Mike] or something else that doesnt make this mistake.
-Eli "

Other Net News/TILs/Software Updates: (Thanks to Barney Buoy)

NEWS
• Pocket-Size MP3 Players Pack Powerful Punch for Music to Go
• X-Box alert! Microsoft got game?

  TILS

• PowerBook (FireWire): Final Cut Pro Requires Sound Manager 3.6.3
• iMovie 1.0.x: Appearance Sound Track Causes Audio Pops
• PowerBook (FireWire): FireWire Target Disk Mode
• AirPort Base Station: DHCP Client ID Support
• Mac OS 9: Keychain Not Applicable to AirPort 1.0
• iDisk: Using With Firewalls
• Mac OS X Server: Mac OS X Server 1.2 Upgrade Instructions
• AirPort Base Station: DHCP Client ID Support

  SOFTWARE UPDATES

• VST USB Floppy driver update

For a blast from the past, see what was on the main news page one year ago today and two years ago.

The recent features page also lists articles posted (most recent first) as does the sidebar links here. The site topics pages (systems, cpu upgrades, etc. - see top and sidebar links on this page) also are places to check as well as the FAQ.

Friday's News Summary

• Free Unreal Tournament Expansion Pack
• Rainbow 6 Column Issue 6 Single/Multi-Player Tips
• 3Dfx Comments on Mac Models/Status
• Dual/Quad Chip 3Dfx Card Power Connections
• Clarification on Past IXmicro Driver Comments
• OpenGL 1.1.3 on Firewire PB
• PB Firewire DVD Image Quality
• Mac Voodoo5 (dual chip) PCI?
• Apple Game Exec Joins Nvidia
• iMaxPower 466 owner entries in database
• $64.95/128MB Generic PC100 Dimms
• Final Cut Pro Capture to Plus40 in Firewire Case
• Audio Capture with Plus40
• Sam's Club WD Expert 20GB Drives $114.98 After Rebate
• More Firewire PCI Cards (3 and 6 port)
• More Info On B&W G3 Striped RAID Boot
• More USB Mic Info
• Other Net News/Software Updates

Thursday's News Summary

• News links, TIL and Software updates
• New PowerBook DVD Feedback
• Roger Wilco Alpha Download
• USB Microphones
• Bootable Firewire Info
• Western Digital Firewire Drives
• Ricoh DVD/CDR Combo Drive in B&W G3
• More Info on Mac SoundBlaster Live Driver Release
• Firewire/IDE CDR Info
• iMaxPowr G3/466 w/iMac Game Wizard Quake3/Quake2 Performance
• IBM ViaVoice and Headsets
• Wanted: PB (Firewire) DVD Playback Reports
• B&W G3 SCSI RAID Booting?

Wednesday's News Summary

• Maxtor Plus40 Performance in Clubmac Firewire/IDE Case
• Comments on Clubmac firewire case
• Rumor of OEM Soundblaster Live Deal
• Newer iMaxPowr 466 & iMac Game Wizard A-OK
• Pismo PB G3/500 Game/MacBench Performance
• U2 Cheetah vs IDE
• More B&W G3 Rev 1 Drive Upgrade Reports
• Ricoh DVD/CDR Combo Drive at Computer City
• Pioneer 10X DVD in B&W G3 Report
• WD 10GB/Platter Caviar IDE Drives
• Another Headhunters Quake3 Mod Tip
• Future of IXMicro Graphics Card Drivers
• Quake3 Smoke Tip for Voodoo3 Cards
• The Rate Your CPU Upgrade, Mac Game Reviews and Mac Game/Video Card Performance databases were updated with new entries.

For links to older news pages see the Archives page.

The recent features page has a lists reviews/articles you may have missed.

For a guide to finding answers to questions - see my Site Guide page.

Considering a CPU Upgrade? Search the CPU Upgrade Owner's Survey results and search for owner reports by Mac model and/or card brand. The current database has more than 3,300+ reports and growing.