IDE in SE/30?

#1 Sat, 24 Jan 2009 - 18:33

Is it possible to hook up an IDE drive to an SE/30 via IDE-SCSI adapter card? Could the drive be used as a boot drive for system 7? What about system 6?

Thanks in advance

#2 Sat, 24 Jan 2009 - 20:42

Definitely, it will just be seen as a hard drive exactly like the SCSI one would be. The trouble is finding a reasonably priced SCSI-IDE adapter. The other thing you can do with these is then buy a IDE-CF adapter and use a CompactFlash card as storage for your old Mac (silent, faster).

#3 Sat, 24 Jan 2009 - 22:40

Consider browsing our Wiki pages. In case you use a recent drive attached to a vintage Mac you might need to format that drive using an outdated driver. If your Mac does not recognise the drive properly, try to reformat the drive using a formatter known to work for other drives in that same system. For Apple's own Drive Setup this might require a software patch, however.

#4 Sat, 24 Jan 2009 - 22:45

I had thought about that. Has anyone successfully hooked up an IDE SSD and used it as a boot disk?

#5 Sun, 25 Jan 2009 - 09:35

I for one have never tried any kind of IDE drive in my SE/30, more less SSD's. But I will admit that I want to try a flash drive in my machine at some point. Manabu Sakai of ARTMIX has long sold a flash card adapter setup for the SE/30, but it's not cheap and he refuses to give real world comparison feedback on how fast it is versus a normal 7200rpm spinning platter hard disk.

But you know, what would really be THE ULTIMATE solution is a custom made PDS card with 4GB or so of memory. Bypass the SCSI interface altogether and have your drive connect direct to the processor. It would be like having a RAM disk that never loses its contents. Not sure how compatible that would be, but I would LOVE to see something like that appear!

#6 Sun, 25 Jan 2009 - 17:39

Indeed that would be awesome, but I don't think my skills are in the realm of custom components...

...yet

#7 Wed, 28 Jan 2009 - 10:12

THE ULTIMATE solution is a custom made PDS card

Such things have been discussed before, at some length:

68060 accelerator cards for Mac: Would you be willing?

Dream peripherals (the return)

"Use the search, Luke"

#8 Wed, 28 Jan 2009 - 12:43

Luke, er, Bunsen... Thanks for saving us the search! I found those two threads an interesting read. It was the first I'd heard of Coldfire. And in the first thread you mentioned, I found this fellow's insight on SCSI quite interesting:

http://68kmla.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=61401#61401

#9 Wed, 28 Jan 2009 - 18:45

I'd be Obi Wan in this context, wouldn't I?

DriverGuru - hasn't been seen round these parts since. I hope it wasn't something I said :-/