I decided to proceed by taking out the battery and using the same voltage of wall wart to power it. It spun up right away so I shut it down and looked for the handiest Mac to connect it to. That happened to be a 6500. I hooked everything up and turned on the drive and it went sprt sprt sprt and didn't spin up. Disconnected it from the 6500 and turned it on and it spun up. Tried it with just a regular 50 to 25 SCSI cable and the same spt spt spt. Tried a different cable and the same.

So I went digging for an old powerbook and a HDI-30 SCSI cable. The topmost one was a 520c. Connected everything up, drive spun up and once the 520c booted, I could read and write to the external drive.