Alternative SCSI Utilities

If your needs are modest, the cost of a download might be all you have to pay for a useful SCSI utility. If your work has you constantly mounting and dismounting removable media such as SyQuest cartridges or MO disks, check out Robert Polic's SCSIProbe 3.5. It's a freeware Control Panel that scans the SCSI bus and displays the peripherals in a window. You can reset the SCSI bus, and a Mount button lets you mount removable media. SCSIProbe can install its own Extension that automatically mounts the media if it's present in a drive at boot time, and it lets you mount drives with a hot-key combination after the Mac is up and running. An option setting lets SCSIProbe close and remove any driver loaded from the media when it was mounted, thus conserving memory and avoiding driver conflicts when another cartridge is mounted in the drive. What SC SIProbe can't do is format and partition the device's media.

If you own A/UX, you already have a SCSI utility. In recognition of the fact that most A/UX software gets installed on huge third-party drives, Apple provides a ``universal formatter'' program. This is just a special version of HD SC Setup that skips the firmware check and manipulates the SCSI device anyway. The A/UX 3.0 HD SC utility successfully formatted all the hard drives tested in this review. However, this utility works only with hard drives, not with removable-media units.