A long time ago, I purchased an Adaptec SlimSCSI 1480 card for my Pismo – it worked great under OS 9.x, allowing me to connect to all of my legacy peripherals when I upgraded from my WallStreet. I’ve got a significant investment here: a scanner, a Zip drive, a Jaz drive, a CD-RW, and even a tape backup.
Back in April, Adaptec released beta drivers for this card for Mac OS X 10.1.3. Well, under that version of OS X it was flaky at best – but it was beta, so I was hopeful that the release version would resolve the issues. Once I moved to OS X 10.2.2, I’ve been forced to uninstall the driver and physically remove the card from my system because of the problems it was causing.
So I decided to give up on the card and use one from a different vendor. Not knowing where to begin, I went to Google and searched for “powerbook scsi mac os x pcmcia cardbus”. I found this link for “Adaptec SCSI for Laptops.”
I can’t seem to find any other vendors who make such a thing. So apparently my only alternatives are to boot into Mac OS 9 to access my SCSI devices (an option that won’t be available on new computers starting next month) or to buy a USB-to-SCSI adapter. But USB is so very slow, and SCSI is so nice and fast, that it seems to be a waste of time and effort.
So the question is: Since I can’t get Adaptec’s SlimSCSI 1480 running under Mac OS X 10.2.2, and since they’ve seemed to abandon drivers for the card, does anybody know of any other product that will allow me to use my PCMCIA (CardBus) slot for a SCSI card?
If not, does anyone know anything or have any insight into what Adaptec is doing with the drivers for this and do they plan on releasing any working drivers anytime soon?
