In my quest to build out the capacity to digitize a lot of old slides and negatives, I’m finding it to be a piecemeal affair.
A scanner I have, finally: I scored a Nikon Super Coolpix LS-2000, but at that price (US$89), it lacked cabling of any kind. So I am waiting for an UltraSCSI cable to show up before I even know if it works. I have a CD/DVD burner but the OS doesn’t believe in it: it’s so generic I have to use Toast (which freeware version shipped with the drive). But I have no DVD media so I can’t be sure how well it works (it will burn CDs and it was new, factory-sealed, so I’m optimistic).
I also got an 80Gb drive, since the old B&W this is all going into has a mere 12 Gb drive: too small to be really useful. And as luck would have it, it’s a Rev 1 Blue and White, so it can only take a single ATA drive: later releases — the Rev 2 models — could handle an additional drive.
As a result, I can either scrap the 12 Gb drive and replace it with the 80 or score an ATA card and add the 80 with room for more if I need it. A Mac-compatible one runs between US$40 and US$100. I’ll get one of those once I see some coin from my contract work (which won’t be til after the new year and school starts up). And there’s always that Google AdSense revenue rolling in . . . . (I don’t expect to see anything from there until June: if you’re familiar with AdSense’s pay schedule, you know why that is).
Judging by this, the additional controller card is the way to go: the data corruption risk and the fact that the on-board controller might not see anything with a DMA speed in excess of 33(!) don’t thrill me.
I really don’t want to sink a lot of cash into a machine this old (ca 1997) and I suppose this isn’t all that much. But let’s hope this is as bad as it gets.
A local hero is parting out some old Mac hardware (disks, RAM, etc.) and perhaps that will help stanch the flow.