A surprise unwrapping a "new" 7600/120

[ziggy29]

Next installment!

Just scrounged up a deal on a Sonnet Tempo HD card. This is one that can both directly attach a 2.5" hard drive on the card and has an ATA connection for a 3.5" drive as well. I had an old 2.5" hard disk around (a 60 GB Hitachi, I believe, once pulled from a Pismo that later got an SSD) so I decided to try that first. Not sure if this will be faster than using a cable to a separate 3.5" HDD, but intuitively I can't imagine it would be slower.

The card was plug and play, at least with my installation of OS 9.1. Then I booted into CD and cloned my existing SCSI drive to one partition on the ex-Pismo ATA/IDE ("ATA") HDD that was now connected to the Tempo HD. It booted right up, and was much more quiet and felt more responsive. So now it was time to test each drive.

First test -- boot times, from chimes until all the desktop was displayed and the mouse and keyboard were responsive. On the SCSI drive the boot time was 1:47; on the ATA, it took 1:27. Not dramatically different, but significant.

Next test -- time to launch Classilla. SCSI took 23 seconds. ATA required 12. Better in terms of ratios.

Finally, on to Quickbench these drives. First up, the old 4.5 GB Quantum Viking SCSI drive that was in it when I acquired this unit:



It all seemed to cluster at or near 7 MB/sec as the test file sizes grew. Next up, the ATA:



Seemed like some odd spikes, and I ran it a couple more times but the bottom line is that the right side of the graph tended to cluster in the 16-20 MB/sec range. Very nice. For even larger files (> 1 MB) it seemed to max at around 24 MB/sec while the SCSI topped out at around 8 MB/sec for those large files.

And the cool thing is, this is far from the ultimate setup but it's already much better, faster and quieter. I'd imagine with a PCI SATA card and an SSD it would really go and eventually hit the limits of the architecture. This is a 12+ year old hard drive in the Pismo, by the way, and I think it's only 4200 RPM but I could be wrong. And even with that, the raw throughput rate almost tripled.

So here's the updated rig so far:

* Power Mac 7600 with Sonnet Crescendo G3 300 MHz card with 512K L2 cache
* 384 MB interleaved 60 ns RAM (upgradeable to 1 GB but that seems like overkill at this point)
* Rage 128 PCI graphics with 16 MB of VRAM, driving 1280 x 1024 at millions of colors
* Sonnet Tempo HD PCI card with attached 2.5" 60GB mechanical HDD
* Adaptec DuoConnect AUA-3020 PCI card with three USB ports (rated 2.0 but 1.1 speed in OS 9) and two FW400 ports

More to come eventually as cheap upgrade finds are made.

 

[ziggy29]

Interestingly enough, though my first try with OS 8.6 (what was already installed) didn't entirely play nicely with the USB and FireWire, I did a fresh install of 8.6 on a partition of the "new" ATA HDD in here (I made three partitions as a sandbox), and after applying the 1.4.1 USB updater and the 2.4 FireWire updater for OS 8.6, and the Sonnet 3.1 upgrade card software, it's all working fine, and this time even the USB flash drives and FireWire external drive volumes mount. Realistically I doubt I could go earlier than 8.6 and get everything working (USB *might* work, almost certainly not FW).... but that may not stop me from trying!

 

[havokalien]

if you get usb to work with system 7 in any version let me know please. No luck to date with the TAM and USB card and 7.6.1.

 

[ziggy29]

Aaaand, here we go again!

Two changes here: First of all, a kind soul sent me two 64 MB DIMMS for this model to top me up to the officially supported 512 MB maximum for this machine, 8 x 64 MB 60 ns 168-pin EDO DIMMs with full interleaving. Thanks! It's a wonderful community of folks keeping these things alive!



Happy Mac, indeed!

The other change here is that I took the SSD from my sick Pismo, a 120 GB Kingston mSATA device connected to an Ableconn mSATA-to-IDE adapter, and after using SuperDuper to clone the Pismo contents to a Firewire drive for archival (should it be needed for resurrection), I borrowed it to put into this Mac, replacing the mechanical HDD that connected to the PCI ATA card before (the card, recall, is a Sonnet Tempo HD). I reformatted into five partitions, one reserved for common and shared files/apps and the others for OS installs. For now I copied over the 8.6 and 9.1 installs I had before. I'll probably try 8.1 later and maybe for fun I'll see how far I can get with 7.6.1 though my expectations there are very low.

First test is the cold boot, from chimes to "ready". Recall that with the IDE mechanical drive the time required was 1:27. The SSD solution brings that to 1:08 (as before, an average of three runs) . Again, not dramatic but significant.

As for the disk throughput, recall that under OS 9.1 the IDE/mechanical benchmarks were coming in at close to 24 MB/sec for these large files. First I ran the same test under OS 9.1:



As files get larger, the read speed is better than 30 MB/s and around 26 MB/s for writing. While I was at it I decided to boot into 8.6 to see if there are any OS differences. It seems with 8.6 it's slightly faster:



Under OS 8.6 I'm getting over 31 MB/s and starting to approach 32 MB/s for large files. Write speeds are approaching 27 MB/s. I believe the maximum capacity of this PCI bus is 33 MB/s? If so, we're starting to seriously test the limits.

One quirk with this SSD solution on this hardware: It seems that whenever I cold boot even after a normal, orderly shutdown, the bootup originally tried to tell me that the system didn't shut down correctly. But when I stopped the "fix" and ran DFA later it said there were no problems with the disk. This happened on both the 8.6 and 9.1 partitions reliably, so it looks like a "false positive" associated with this drive (the venerable SCSI drive, still connected, doesn't do this). I've disabled the check at startup. Has anyone seen that behavior before?

 

[ziggy29]

Installed 7.6.1, and it took. (I didn't install by booting from CD, an intentional decision to see what would happen. I installed off of CD while running 9.1.)

I took out the USB keyboard and mouse, added the ADB counterparts. Changed the startup disk to 7.6.1 and rebooted. Got the mouse moving, got the "happy Mac" icon and the Mac OS splash screen briefly. Then....

BOOM. Bus error! OK, I figured, something went wrong. Probably 7.6.1 didn't know what to do with the G3 upgrade (I know it's supposed to be OS 8+, but what the hell.) I tried to reboot from 9.1 CD because the startup disk was stuck on a crashing system. Computer wouldn't recognize me pressing 'C', and again... BOOM.

Then I unseated the PCI card, figuring that would cause boot from SCSI. But then it booted from CD, and there was no SCSI System Folder showing as a possible startup disk. I managed to get the CD out and started again. Eventually the Mac saw the SCSI drive, after a long boot sequence... and it rebuilt the desktop before I could start again. So I shut it down, reinserted the ATA card, booted into the SCSI again and then it had to rebuild all the desktops on the SSD before I could start again. Only then could I boot into 8.6 or 9.1 on the SSD again.

I may try 7.6.1 again, but only after starting from CD. If I get another bus error, it's probably because of the G3 upgrade because I know this system should otherwise be able to run 7.6.1. Still up: Trying 8.1. There's a decent chance I'll get USB working on that one but it's very unlikely I'll get FireWire will work at all.

 

[oi!]

Have you tried one of the USB to PS2 adapters? I'm told they worn on Apple ADB too.They're inexpensive on eBay too.

(actually I'm hoping an owner of a Mac with ABD will do an experiment for me, if you plug in a USB pen drive via a USB to ADB adapter, can you access the drive?)

 

[ziggy29]

Have you tried one of the USB to PS2 adapters? I'm told they worn on Apple ADB too.They're inexpensive on eBay too.

(actually I'm hoping an owner of a Mac with ABD will do an experiment for me, if you plug in a USB pen drive via a USB to ADB adapter, can you access the drive?)

If I get hold of an adapter I'll try it. I always figured these were one-way; they could allow USB to work out of an ADB port but not the other way around. Has anyone actually gotten these to USB devices to work in ADB this way?

A few more things on my project: I can boot 7.6.1 from CD but when I install from CD and try to boot from the disk, I get the bus error. It starts booting and some extensions load, and then it crashes. I may want to try with extensions off to see if it will boot up, since it works off CD. I installed 8.1 also and it works great other than no USB yet. I understand it takes some tricks to get 8.1 to take USB if you don't have one of the iMacs that used a special version of 8.1 which supported USB. Disk throughput on 8.1 is even faster than on 8.6 --about 33.7 MB/s, which surprised me since I thought 33 MB/s was the max on the PCI bus.

 

[ziggy29]

With a downloaded set of "custom" (hacked?) three extensions, USB now works in 8.1 for mouse and keyboard support. USB flash drives are not recognized. Also, System 7.6.1 WILL boot up with extensions off while booting, but blows up when extensions are loaded. Now wondering which extension is causing the booboo as these are all "stock" extensions from the OS 7.6.1 CD (no third party extensions).

[Edit to add: Curiously, while 7.6.1 boots with extensions disabled, it still crashes with extensions enabled even if NO extensions are in the Extensions folder. Apple System Profiler reports the CPU as a "PowerPC 740 at 195 MHz". Usually in 8.1+ it reported as a 337 MHz G3 before the Sonnet software was enabled and a 306 MHz G3 after. Of course, 7.6.1 didn't know what a "G3" was. Still it seems odd -- something must be loading even with no extensions in the Extensions folder that makes it crash when disabling them doesn't.]

 

[havokalien]

The cpu is looking for the G3 enabler (which is an extension) and then crashes as the startup without extention treats the upgrade as basically generic with no drivers for cache and the like. I am sure I have way oversimplified this but thats the outcome. System requirements for the upgrade will tell you wether or not it was tested with that OS and which enabler to use.

 

[ziggy29]

Next up -- the Radeon 9200! This the actual Mac version, with 128 megs of VRAM, not a flashed PC card. I have just confirmed this works well in my PM 7600 running OS 8.6 and OS 9.1, and mostly (apparently without acceleration) in OS 8.1. Note that this is the actual retail Mac Edition PCI 9200 with 128 MB of VRAM which is overkill for this model, but I digress. I do it because I can! I reached a little for this one financially, but it was the actual Mac version, new and in the box, and the price wasn't that bad. So I bit in a moment of weakness.

I downloaded the file '9200os9.sit' from here: http://www.kranenburg.cc/mirko.cc/macclassic.html -- especially because the actual ATI installer doesn't support this model and even if it would install, it requires OS 9.2.2.

(I've seen links to the Howfunkel site, but when I use Stuffit on that archive the file types are gone and not recognized as extensions. At this site, the file unstuffs fine.)

Then I made backups of my 8.1, 8.6 and 9.1 extensions folders.

With my previous video card -- a Rage 128 with 16MB of VRAM -- still in place I began to move the files -- it's best to install these while the old card is still there. I rebooted with extensions off and copied the 12 files in the new "9200os9" folder into my three Extensions folders once I had a good backup copy of each. I rebooted once into 9.1 with the Rage 128 to confirm it still worked fine. It did.

Then I shut down, replaced the Rage 128 with the 9200, booted into 9.1, and it all worked fine. Next, I booted into 8.6. Again, worked perfectly.

Finally, back to OS 8.1. It crashed on an extension while booting up (sosmething like "unable to load code fragment" or some such). Trial and error indicated it was the "ATI Resource Manager" extension which was the culprit; removing it and leaving the other 11 in place works *except* that the acceleration extension is "X-ed out" when loading at boot time. Other than that it seems to be working fine. (That extension causes no problems in 8.6 or 9.1 for me.)

So in 9.1 and 8.6 it works beautifully and in 8.1 it works without acceleration, as far as I can tell.

 

[bunnspecial]

As a side note, if you ever upgrade to OS 9.2.2 do the install WITHOUT the Radeon 9200 install and then install the extensions(from the disk) before installing the car.

Otherwise, the system will hang as soon as finder loads and you will be up the proverbial creek. Don't ask me how I know

The same is true of the AGP Radeon 9000, unless you are using an MDD or late Ti book specific OS 9 install.

 

[ziggy29]

As a side note, if you ever upgrade to OS 9.2.2 do the install WITHOUT the Radeon 9200 install and then install the extensions(from the disk) before installing the car.

Otherwise, the system will hang as soon as finder loads and you will be up the proverbial creek. Don't ask me how I know

The same is true of the AGP Radeon 9000, unless you are using an MDD or late Ti book specific OS 9 install.

Right, everything I've seen about these tells you to install all the software before the hardware. That is also what I did here already. If the extensions aren't already loaded when the new hardware boots up, it isn't likely to go well. Should I do it I'd probably put the Rage 128 back in at first and then reinstall the drivers and such for the 9200.

At some point I do intend to try out 9.2.2 on this thing with OS9Helper, and perhaps try OS X with XPostFacto. This thing will be slow as hell running Tiger but it should be able to do it... again, just because the challenge is there.

 

[bunnspecial]

I've been playing some good old games(Sim City 3000) on my 9600/200MP this evening. It's running 9.2.2 and has I think 396mb of RAM, and actually runs fairly well. It runs better than 9.1. I also ran Tiger with @lighbulbfun ;s patched kernel, and although it was slow it did at least boot.

I've long advocated 8.6 on lower spec hardware, but the later PowerMacs with lots of RAM do run 9.2.2 very well. I like 8.6 since its resource footprint is smaller than OS 9 but it adds support for USB mass storage devices. Granted the 9600 is at an advantage since by virtue of its number of RAM slots I can load the "junk" 32 and 16mb sticks and still end up with a decent amount of RAM. My 6500(very generously given to me by another forum member) has two RAM slots that can take 64mb each, and it took me a long evening of mixing and matching to get two 64mb sticks that the computer liked.

I just wish that I'd broken down and bought 10 or 20 128mb sticks(20 would have maxed both my 8600 and 9600) before OWC more than doubled the price on them. They were $7.99 each for a while, and now have gone up to about $20 each.

 

[ziggy29]

I just wish that I'd broken down and bought 10 or 20 128mb sticks(20 would have maxed both my 8600 and 9600) before OWC more than doubled the price on them. They were $7.99 each for a while, and now have gone up to about $20 each.

Yeah, I know. I can easily get 64 MB sticks for $5 on eBay if I needed them (and I may buy a couple just in case any of the eight I have in this machine crap out -- it's nice to have a backup plan). But OWC wants $20 a piece for the 128MB sticks, and that means $160 to max out the RAM. Now this is a hobby for me which is why I paid a little more for for this 9200 card than I planned (about $40 with shipping) but I don't know that more than 512 MB of RAM will really do a lot more than 512 MB will. And I think this video card could be repurposed for future projects if need be, so I was willing to extend a little for it.

That said, at $10 I might buy a few 128MB sticks for posterity, but not quite for $20. I'm also dealing with that sbout PB batteries. Do I buy a few for the future or not, risking that at some point I can't unplug them?

 

[bunnspecial]

That said, at $10 I might buy a few 128MB sticks for posterity, but not quite for $20. I'm also dealing with that sbout PB batteries. Do I buy a few for the future or not, risking that at some point I can't unpluig?

I've been going through and buying Newertech batteries that are still available as I can afford. I recently bought ones for my Macbook and pre-Unibody Macbook Pro. I need to get a black one for another Macbook. I still want to get some TiBook and 15/17" Powerbook Batteries.

I've actually been really fortunate in batteries for some older Powerbooks. Both my Kanga and first 3400C came with good batteries. I bought a near unused old stock battery(I call it near unused because the seller had opened and charged it up) for a 3400c, and it also works perfectly. The only "bad" one I have came in a 3400C I bought for parts. The ones that came in laptops are good for 2h+ and the NOS one is 3h+.

Just today, I bought a new in box Apple Lombard/Pismo battery. It wasn't cheap, but I'm going to give it a try. the seller has a bunch, so if this one works I'll probably buy a couple more. Surprisingly enough, NOS batteries often work well. I currently have one battery that appears to charge fine, but it's good for 10-15 minutes at best.

The only thing I really lack is a good Wallstreet/PDQ battery. I think I have 5 or 6, and two are good enough that they can power the computer for about 20 minutes asleep.

Ultimately, I'll call it "good enough" if I have a battery that can get me from outlet to outlet(with a couple of minutes in between) but having a good battery is a real luxury on an old computer.

 

[oi!]

Does it take 72-pin or 168-pin sticks?

There are 256mb 72-pin ram sticks.
I'm pretty sure there were 512mb 168-pin sticks, and maybe 1Gb too - but not sure.

Or is my memory playing tricks?
(no pun intended)
[doublepost=1467054761][/doublepost]Also, the value of the pound has crashed against the dollar, now is a good time to buy from British eBay.

 

[bunnspecial]

Does it take 72-pin or 168-pin sticks?

There are 256mb 72-pin ram sticks.
I'm pretty sure there were 512mb 168-pin sticks, and maybe 1Gb too - but not sure.

Or is my memory playing tricks?
(no pun intended)

This series of Macs takes 168 pin 5V EDO RAM-it's not at all compatible with the much more common 168 pin SDRAM(used in G3 towers and G4 towers up to the MDD, along with slot loading iMac G3s, early eMacs, and early iMacs).

I have not encountered any sticks larger than 128mb.

I'd be really interested in seeing these supposed 256mb 72 pin SIMMs

 

[ziggy29]

This series of Macs takes 168 pin 5V EDO RAM-it's not at all compatible with the much more common 168 pin SDRAM(used in G3 towers and G4 towers up to the MDD, along with slot loading iMac G3s, early eMacs, and early iMacs).

I have not encountered any sticks larger than 128mb.

Yep. Never seen them. These days I only see the 128MB sticks at OWC for $20 each, which is more than I'm willing to pay for a pure hobby. (Yes, I reached a little for the 9200 but it can be easily repurposed elsewhere and this was a good price for the real "Mac version", not a flashed PC version.) Once in a while I troll eBay and elsewhere to see if someone is selling some for less, just for the hell of it (in reality does a 7600, even one with a G3 card, need more than 512MB? If you're doing something that serious, you're not spending that much on an Old World PCI Power Mac to do it), but nada so far.

The 64MB sticks are readily available (new) for $5 each, which is a much better buy if anyone needs some. At least for the models that have 8 or more RAM slots. The 128MB sticks may have a niche for upgraded 7200s and 7300s which only have four RAM slots.

 

[bunnspecial]

Like I said, I wish I'd bit the bullet to max my 8600 and 9600 when they were still $10 each-it's not happening with them at $20 each.

I still want at least 512mb in the 8600 so that I can get Leopard on it, and buying from OWC make sense as that computer with a processor upgrade is VERY picky. I'll likely buy 8x128 from OWC just to get 1gb of new production, matched sticks for Leopard.

Filling the 9600 with 64mb sticks would only cost me $60 at Ebay prices(actually less since there are currently some in it) and would leave me with 768mb-a more than respectable amount. Truth be told, there are positives to doing the Leopard project in that computer, but I ruled it out because mine is the rare 200MP(2x604ev at 200mhz) and I don't want to give those up.

If you must have an OWR PCI Mac(I got a call to troubleshoot one earlier this week-they are out there) a G3 really is in many ways a better choice. Not only is the processor itself faster than a lot of 604s(and can be upgraded a LOT faster if you're so inclined) but you get the benefit of a 66mhz system bus vs. 50mhz and fast, readily available PC-66 RAM. A G3 beige maxes at 768mb, but for a lot of purposes that's plenty.

Heck, as that goes, for a lot of purposes where you "need" an OWR Mac, a B&W G3 will do the job. You get MUCH faster processors and the ability to go up to 1.1ghz in a G3 or 1ghz in a G4(if you can find one ) plus 1gb of RAM max on a 100mhz bus. You get 10/100 ethernet on board, a fast dedicated GPU slot, and three extra PCI slots if you need interface cards or the like. You have ADB if you're running software that requires a HASP, and can put in a Stealth port or Geoport(I think one of mine has a Geoport) if you need RS-422.

 

[ziggy29]

I still want at least 512mb in the 8600 so that I can get Leopard on it, and buying from OWC make sense as that computer with a processor upgrade is VERY picky. I'll likely buy 8x128 from OWC just to get 1gb of new production, matched sticks for Leopard.

Yeah, plus interleaving is really picky on these machines. In theory the same style of RAM at the same size and same speed should interleave, but that's... theory. Some of the boards are pickier than others, but all of that generation was fussy about memory and interleaving as I recall.

It's still on my to-do list to load Tiger on my 7600, just for the hell of it. Just need to get XPostFacto ready and a couple hours to dedicate. I don't expect much performance but just the thought of doing it makes my inner geek happy. It's only a G3 and not a G4 so Leopard is out.

 

[bunnspecial]

Yeah, plus interleaving is really picky on these machines. In theory the same style of RAM at the same size and same speed should interleave, but that's... theory. Some of the boards are pickier than others, but all of that generation was fussy about memory and interleaving as I recall.

It's still on my to-do list to load Tiger on my 7600, just for the hell of it. Just need to get XPostFacto ready and a couple hours to dedicate. I don't expect much performance but just the thought of doing it makes my inner geek happy. It's only a G3 and not a G4 so Leopard is out.

I actually have the RAM stacked in my 9600 to keep the computer from even trying to interleave. If you have RAM that looks similar to the computer but is different I've seen the computer try to interleave it and become unstable as a result. Basically, I will only allow the computer to interleave with RAM from the same, known source which is getting increasingly difficult. In fact, I bought a bare 8500 logic board a couple of weeks...the primary attraction was the Sonnet G3 on it, but it had a couple of pairs of 64mb sticks on it that I felt reasonably good about.

BTW, thanks to @LightBulbFun 's work, it's possible to run Tiger on a 604 provided that you have at least 96mb of RAM-just don't expect to win any speed contests . Unless you have a secret stash of unnaturally large SCSI drives, too, you'll want a bootable ATA card.

Funny enough, as it is now my 8600 will boot Tiger on the 604 but KPs with the 700mhz Sonnet G4 I have. I think the problem is likely RAM related, and like I said just want to bit the bullet and get at least a decent amount of new 128mb sticks from OWC so I can rule that out.

 

[ziggy29]

I have discovered the source of the "bus error" when booting up 7.6.1 with extensions enabled. It wasn't the upgraded CPU card. It was virtual memory.

When I booted up with extensions off, went in and disabled VM and then rebooted again, and it all worked; even the Sonnet G3 card's software extension loaded correctly and is operating normally.

That would explain why booting with extensions off worked -- with extensions off, VM is disabled even if you have it enabled in the control panel. Fortunately with 512 MB of RAM I don't see ever needing VM in System 7.6.1.

Might the problem be that the partition (about 9.5 GB) is too large to enable VM in System 7.6.1? This is definitely an HFS partition, whereas all the other 8.1+ partitions are formatted HFS+. Of course, I've heard reports that the combination of 7.6, VM and PCI IDE cards can do this, too.



My next project may be to load Tiger on this thing, though -- and laugh about how long it takes to startup...

 

[bunnspecial]

I have discovered the source of the "bus error" when booting up 7.6.1 with extensions enabled. It wasn't the upgraded CPU card. It was virtual memory.

When I booted up with extensions off, went in and disabled VM and then rebooted again, and it all worked; even the Sonnet G3 card's software extension loaded correctly and is operating normally.

That would explain why booting with extensions off worked -- with extensions off, VM is disabled even if you have it enabled in the control panel. Fortunately with 512 MB of RAM I don't see ever needing VM in System 7.6.1.

Might the problem be that the partition (about 9.5 GB) is too large to enable VM in System 7.6.1? This is definitely an HFS partition, whereas all the other 8.1+ partitions are formatted HFS+. Of course, I've heard reports that the combination of 7.6, VM and PCI IDE cards can do this, too.

Thanks-that's great to know!

I generally not a big fan of virtual memory in computers where there's more than enough real memory, so keep it turned off.

With that said, I pulled out a G3 beige tower the other day so that I could put together some hard drives for a friend(computer at work he was trying to fix). Before I started messing around with new HDDs, I tried to boot it to the OS install already on it and kept getting "bus error" as well. I also had issues booting off an install disk. I pulled RAM and took it down to 128mb, and it booted fine in everything. The computer was marked 192mb on the front from a previous owner, which means that it probably came to me with 128+64. I'd installed two additional 128mb sticks-readily identifiable as ones I'd supplied by their size written in sharpie on the back . Pulling those two sticks let it boot fine.

 

[ziggy29]

Thanks-that's great to know!

I generally not a big fan of virtual memory in computers where there's more than enough real memory, so keep it turned off.

Yeah, I actually turned it off on the other system partitions on this Mac (8.1, 8.6 and 9.1 so far) after install, but I never got around to thinking about disabling VM with extensions off here -- until this morning when I was fiddling with control panel settings with extensions off. Usually I did that after a clean, full boot.

 

[oi!]

This series of Macs takes 168 pin 5V EDO RAM-it's not at all compatible with the much more common 168 pin SDRAM(used in G3 towers and G4 towers up to the MDD, along with slot loading iMac G3s, early eMacs, and early iMacs).

I have not encountered any sticks larger than 128mb.

I'd be really interested in seeing these supposed 256mb 72 pin SIMMs

Yep. Never seen them. These days I only see the 128MB sticks at OWC for $20 each, which is more than I'm willing to pay for a pure hobby. (Yes, I reached a little for the 9200 but it can be easily repurposed elsewhere and this was a good price for the real "Mac version", not a flashed PC version.) Once in a while I troll eBay and elsewhere to see if someone is selling some for less, just for the hell of it (in reality does a 7600, even one with a G3 card, need more than 512MB? If you're doing something that serious, you're not spending that much on an Old World PCI Power Mac to do it), but nada so far.

The 64MB sticks are readily available (new) for $5 each, which is a much better buy if anyone needs some. At least for the models that have 8 or more RAM slots. The 128MB sticks may have a niche for upgraded 7200s and 7300s which only have four RAM slots.

Oh, I just make this crap up, to troll you all for ***** and giggles.


Oh no wait, I don't.

72-pin 256mb...
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odk...in+256mb+.TRS0&_nkw=72pin+256mb+&_sacat=11210

168-pin 512mb...
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_odk...pin+512mb.TRS0&_nkw=168pin+512mb&_sacat=11210
[doublepost=1467502451][/doublepost]

Unless you have a secret stash of unnaturally large SCSI drives, too, you'll want a bootable ATA card.

http://www.ebay.com/sch/Drives-Stor...ml?_from=R40&_ipg=200&_nkw=300gb+scsi&_sop=15


Actually, a bootable ATA card is an excellent idea even if you do have a secret stash of hi-cap SCSI HD's. With a IDE to SATA adapter, you could have an SSD in there.
SSD prices are still high, but that won't always be the case, occasional bargains crop up now, and I suspect prices of smaller capacity ones (64 120 and maybe 256gb) are likely to fall within the net year or so.
They're not likely to go up, at least.