Hello Jeff,

   JW> The built-in SCSI in the Beige G3 is unenhanced narrow
     > SE SCSI-II. 5 MB/s theoretical.  It's good for hooking
     > up peripherals like CDROMs, tape drives, scanners and
     > removable media drives, but not much good for fast
     > storage.  There are folks who will tell you that it is
     > 10 MB/s but they are confused because they believe
     > that SCSI-II is synonomous with Fast SCSI-II.   The
     > Beige SCSI is unenhanced, not Fast.

Thanks, I shall avoid connecting Barracuda 180 drives to it
then ;-)

   JW> IIRC, the built-in ATA is ATA-33 (or is it 16?) which
     > isn't the fastest around, but only the newer hard
     > drives deliver sustained performance better than 33
     > MB/s anyway, so it should be adequate unless he's
     > really hard core about performance.  Hmmm.  Apple's
     > Developer Note says that it supports ATA-2.  Is that
     > 33 or 16 MB/s?

ATA-2 includes a range of different options (a bit like
SCSI-2 does).  If it were my machine I'd probably look at
adding a nice SCSI card, but the machine's new owner is more
likely to opt for ATA so it might be useful to know which
modes are supported.  I wonder if anyone at Apple knows? :-)

   JW> ...if you need a 3.3V supply on the PCI card, it's
     > available, but by the time the signals leave the card,
     > they need to be 5V signals.   The slots are 32 bit,
     > 33.3333 MHz.

Thanks, now we'll know what to ask for.

   JW> If he still has a copy of the Mac OS installed, launch
     > the Apple System Profiler from the Apple menu and
     > scroll down to "ROM Revision".  If he has $77D.40F2
     > then he has a Rev. A ROM and slave drives are not
     > supported on the IDE busses.  If he has a later
     > revision then slave drives are supported.  If you
     > doesn't have Apple System Profiler or a similar
     > utility available, you can pull the ROM module and
     > read the numbers off of the chips.  If the two chips
     > read 341S0402 and 341S0403, then he has the Rev. A
     > ROM.

I'll forward this to him.  I would prefer not to use ATA
slave devices, but it's always worth knowing what you can
and can't do.

Thanks for your help,
   - Andy Ball.