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Usb 2 card for Pismo

mectojic

mectojic

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Dec 27, 2020
1,358
2,586
Sydney, Australia
Hi,
Bought myself a USB 2 PCMCIA card, that came with Mac OS X drivers. The drivers installed fine, but whenever I put the card in, the entire computer freezes state until I remove it, and then it unfreezes.

Not sure how to fix that, but if it can't be fixed, can anyone recommend a working USB 2 card that I can buy at an affordable price? (Ebay preferably.)
 
This is the card I have for my Pismo, and it works fine without drivers...

IMG_0587.jpg


Cheers :)

Hugh
 
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mectojic said:
Thanks for that! Do you need external power to use it?
Click to expand...
The Cardbus slot passes a small amount of power through to that card. You can usually mount and use a USB pen drive with it. Anything beefier needs to be self-powered.

You can try getting a USB to barrel jack cable and powering a 2.5" hard drive from one of the Pismo's USB ports, if the drive supports external power, but Apple was very stingy in implementing the USB standard and most bus-powered hard drives need two USB ports on PPC Apple hardware in my experience.
 
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Yeah, just one port. I don't really know how often I would use that even as the Pismo has Firewire & I'm pretty sure, in the real world, that even Firewire 400 is faster than USB 2. Anyway, I got this for the Bluetooth.
 
I suppose that I can get the same effect with a 2x USB card, by using one of the USB slots with a bluetooth dongle.

What would you use Firewire 400 for today? I'm genuinely curious. The convenience of USB 2 is that I can easily move files from a modern Mac (or even USB-C iPad) onto my Pismo. But modern Macs don't have any Firewire.
 
Maybe I’m a bit behind the times, as all my Macs have firewire (the most recent machine I have is a mid 2012 i7 MacBook Pro), so most of my backup drives are portable firewire with 2.5” SSDs inside.

Cheers :)

Hugh
 
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mectojic said:
I suppose that I can get the same effect with a 2x USB card, by using one of the USB slots with a bluetooth dongle.

What would you use Firewire 400 for today? I'm genuinely curious. The convenience of USB 2 is that I can easily move files from a modern Mac (or even USB-C iPad) onto my Pismo. But modern Macs don't have any Firewire.
Click to expand...
Problem solved. If in doubt, dongle it. It's the Apple way.

USBC_-_USB_Adapter__92650.1493362496.440.440.jpg


I've actually just used FW, albeit FW800 today. I wanted to resize an APFS volume on my Mac Mini 2009 and found that Apple has made an unholy mess of Disk Utility and the creation and deletion of volumes and containers. Tl;dr APFS is forever and you cannot change anything once created. The only way I could do it was to back up the volume to an external disk, put the Mac Mini into FW target mode and attach that to another Mac so I could wipe the entire disk and start again. Infuriating. I tried the command line and Paragon Hard Disk Manager and nothing works. Even if you use diskutil in Terminal, all you can hope to do is delete a container but you cannot reclaim the space back.

If it weren't for FW, I would have had to dismantle the Mac Mini and haul the drive out to try to format it.
 
Last edited:
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mectojic said:
What would you use Firewire 400 for today?
Click to expand...
I can't count how many times the ability to hook up a pre-Thunderbolt Mac to another system and mess with its drive using FireWire Target Disk Mode has saved me considerable time and headaches.
 
mectojic said:
What would you use Firewire 400 for today? I'm genuinely curious. The convenience of USB 2 is that I can easily move files from a modern Mac (or even USB-C iPad) onto my Pismo. But modern Macs don't have any Firewire.
Click to expand...
I still have loads of stuff, old and newer with Firewire. Remember, I bought my Pismo new in 2000! I have, among others:

A NewerTech SATA drive dock with USB 3, eSATA, Firewire 400 & 800 ports;

A hardware RAID 2 drive enclosure with Firewire 400 & 800;

A Pioneer CD/DVD/BlueRay burner in an external case with USB 3 & Firewire 800;

Multiple IDE & SATA 2.5" enclosures with USB &/or Firewire;

Etc. etc.

Firewire 800 is much faster than USB 2.

I also have an Apple Thunderbolt 2 to Firewire 800 adapter but I don't tend to really transfer anything from my new Macs to my older ones.
 
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mectojic said:
Oh yeah, I remember seeing that but forgot about it!

It's just 1 USB 2.0 port, right?

(It's always funny how those Chinese ads showcase modern Macbooks and laptops which obviously don't have PC card slots.)
Click to expand...
Thats because "C" China has no clue, its not in their little red book, sadly.
 
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