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U320 2.5" SCSI HDDs in vintage Macs?

68kMLA Hardware 10 posts Dec 13, 2011 to Jun 4, 2012
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#1 Tue, 13 Dec 2011 - 22:19 68kMLA
Has anyone tried this yet? You can get 36GB 2.5" Ultra320 drives for $25. Pretty cheap. I was wondering if an Ultra320 drive would even work on an old PowerBook SCSI BUS (or any older Mac's SCSI BUS.)

#2 Tue, 13 Dec 2011 - 23:28 68kMLA
Well, electrically, it will work fine, with an SCA -> 40pin SCSI adapter. I've never seen such a beast, but you could make it work with an SCA -> 50pin adapter, and a 50 -> 40pin adapter. However, that's not going to fit inside of a PowerBook.

I suggest a 2.5" SCSI -> IDE bridge (HARD to find, these days), or a 2.5" SCSI -> CF adapter, like http://www.artmix.com/pdffiles/CF_PM_Manual2_203_Eng.pdf.

- Alex

#3 Wed, 14 Dec 2011 - 02:26 68kMLA
Ah. Well, perhaps not a PowerBoo, but could be a cheap source of large HDDs for other vintage Macs.

#4 Wed, 14 Dec 2011 - 06:05 68kMLA
Some of the newer U320 drives will not however even allow you to fall back on older and slower rates by jumper. I have a small stack of 36gb drives that are useable in nothing but my SGI gear because they are not compatible with the older SCSI standards, even with an adapter.

#5 Wed, 14 Dec 2011 - 08:18 68kMLA
Interesting... I have purchased a HP branded, Seagate made 72.8 GB Ultra-320 SCSI disk which (thru an inexpensive SCA-to-50pin adapter) works perfectly with my old Macs. That includes the SE/30, at least for those partitions below 2 GB ;)

Now you have mentioned SGI... I'd like to reserve a partition on it for backup of my SGI Indy's 18 GB HD, but that's another story... Will the SGI understand the Apple Partition Map?

#6 Wed, 14 Dec 2011 - 15:33 68kMLA
I believe that Irix supports HFS.

I'm not sure though if FX will be okay with it though. You might have to at the least manually partition the drive.

#7 Tue, 29 May 2012 - 21:11 68kMLA
Stumbled upon this thread again through a different thread. It's cool that someone tried it. I'm thinking about getting a 15k RPM drive for my QuickSilver since I now know it works. :)

#8 Tue, 29 May 2012 - 21:19 68kMLA
i think it depends on the brand and wether they decided to have backwards compatibility.

i have a 36gb 10k Fujitsu, and with my sca to 50 adaptor it did not work with the older scsi bus,

however i did have a Ultra 160 PCI Card from a powermac G3 server, and that runs the drive good,

i have the card and drive sitting in my powermac 7500, i had to use xpost to boot OSX panther DVD in order to format it.

#9 Mon, 4 Jun 2012 - 07:40 68kMLA
Would be neat if we could get people to try out different brands so we know which work or not. Then we'd have a source for cheap SCSI drives (for now, anyway.)

#10 Mon, 4 Jun 2012 - 09:34 68kMLA
It may depend on the particular adapter... I have a SCA 36GB Fujitsu which doesn't work at all with my "regular" 50-pin adapter, but it's fine with a "better", terminated adapter.

Maybe we could start a page on our Wiki, in order to collect all experiences and tested models, including jumper settings etc. :b&w:

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