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350mb dosent go very far!

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Well, I ran out of room on my quadra 800s HD. Downladed 20 MP3s and it turnes full. Any sugestions on a good 1GB SCSI hard drive?

 

Unknown_K

Well-known member
Get a 4.5 or 9gb 68pin drive and use a 68 pin to 50 pin adapter, they can both be found on ebay cheap enough. 50 Pin drives will probably cost close to the same and be much smaller, slower, and older.

 

Maccess

Well-known member
Or get an Acard SCSI IDE bridge and use any available IDE drive up to 2 Terabytes. That should be plenty of MP3s.

Or find a SCSI card reader and a bunch of memory cards (suitable for your card reader) to stuff your MP3s.

Honestly, though, I don't think playing MP3s is the best use of a Quadra 800. Many Nokia cellphones will play great MP3s, so will an older iPod or iPod shuffle.

 

Quadraman

Well-known member
Just remember, when you use one of those SCSI-IDE bridges, you will still be limited to the speed of the SCSI bus even though the drive you get may be capable of faster reads and writes on an IDE bus, so don't expect that a newer, faster drive will show big performance improvements.

And isn't there a limit to the size of drives you can use in older Macs? I don't think you can use a 2tb drive with the disk controller in a 68k machine.

 

Maccess

Well-known member
Yes, you can. There isn't a "disk controller" in a SCSI interface, at least not in the IDE sense. The limitation is with the Operating System.

Systems before 7.5.5 support a drive no larger than 4GB, but Appleshare won't support networked drives more than 2GB.

System 7.5.5 and up support partitions of up to two terabytes. If you had a two terabyte partition you would get extremely large minimum file sizes, unless you've got HFS+ on 8.1 and up.

Systems 9.1 and newer can have files larger than 2GB but that doesn't apply to a 68K Mac which can only use up to 8.1, so you're stuck with a max file size of 2GB on 68K

 
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Quadraman

Well-known member
Yes, you can. There isn't a "disk controller" in a SCSI interface, at least not in the IDE sense. The limitation is with the Operating System.
Systems before 7.5.5 support a drive no larger than 4GB, but Appleshare won't support networked drives more than 2GB.

System 7.5.5 and up support partitions of up to two terabytes. If you had a two terabyte partition you would get extremely large minimum file sizes, unless you've got HFS+ on 8.1 and up.

Systems older than 9.1 have a maximum single file size of 2GB but that doesn't apply to a 68K Mac which can only use up to 8.1
Then what's with the 128gb limit I keep reading about?

 

MultiFinder

Well-known member
Yes, you can. There isn't a "disk controller" in a SCSI interface, at least not in the IDE sense. The limitation is with the Operating System.
Systems before 7.5.5 support a drive no larger than 4GB, but Appleshare won't support networked drives more than 2GB.

System 7.5.5 and up support partitions of up to two terabytes. If you had a two terabyte partition you would get extremely large minimum file sizes, unless you've got HFS+ on 8.1 and up.

Systems older than 9.1 have a maximum single file size of 2GB but that doesn't apply to a 68K Mac which can only use up to 8.1
Then what's with the 128gb limit I keep reading about?
That's the drive size limit on older ATA drive controllers.

 

Maccess

Well-known member
The newer ACARD SCSI IDE bridges don't have this limitation, the older ones do.

It's a limitation of the IDE controller that is on the bridge, not on the computer. SCSI doesn't handle drive sectors directly, and the limitation is with IDE's Logical Block Addressing Scheme. All SCSI sees is a big storage space with read/write and other instructions.

That's why SCSI drives are more expensive: All the disk controller activity is in the drive's electronics in SCSI, in IDE it's on the motherboard. Sort of like comparing full modems and Express Modems (and WinModems).

 

SiliconValleyPirate

Well-known member
Cheapest solution I found was to buy a 80-pin SCA SCSI drive and an external case and sit it in the top. Suns '611' Ultra SCSI boxes are fairly easy to find and a re totally plug-and-play on a Quadra (they auto-terminate which is REALLY handy :) ). You'll need to find a 68-pin to 25-pin SCSI cable for one of those, unless you have a Wide SCSI card in the Mac then you can use the 68-pin external port (if it has one - both the SEIV and Jackhammer do) and a 68-68 cable. If you are feeling really enthusiastic you could buy a Sun 711 'Multipack' desktop array. They hold 6 or 12 drives (depending on the model) and are sound deadened to minimise noise.

SCA disks are pretty cheap as a lot of people don't like them because they require some kind of back-plane board. If you have ample internal space then you can always buy a SCA to 50-pin (or 68-pin if you have a Wide SCSI card) adapter. A word of warning though - I've found if you use one of those you need an insulator between the back of the board and the body oft he disk - I used a folded up piece of copier paper.

 

pee-air

Well-known member
Well, I ran out of room on my quadra 800s HD. Downladed 20 MP3s and it turnes full. Any sugestions on a good 1GB SCSI hard drive?
When I bought my first Macintosh, I had to make do with only a 40MB hard drive. I was never able to fill it up though. Macintosh software was hard to come by in my area. And the little compact Macintosh with its black and white screen couldn't run much of the software I was able to find. I remember running into dialog boxes quite frequently with the cursed reminder that "this software requires a resolution of 640 by 480" or "this software requires the monitor to be set to 256 colors". None of these requirements could be satisfied on the compact Macintosh.

My next Macintosh was a compact with a 640 by 480 screen that could do 16-bit color. I no longer had the problem of inadequate screen resolution or color depth. Instead, I was now faced with having a woefully inadequate hard drive. You see, my second Macintosh had only a 160MB drive. So it was constantly full because I could now use all of that software that had been previously unuseable.

Yeah, life sucked as a Mac user.

 

Blessed Cheesemaker

Well-known member
Well, I ran out of room on my quadra 800s HD. Downladed 20 MP3s and it turnes full. Any sugestions on a good 1GB SCSI hard drive?
When I bought my first Macintosh, I had to make do with only a 40MB hard drive. I was never able to fill it up though. Macintosh software was hard to come by in my area. And the little compact Macintosh with its black and white screen couldn't run much of the software I was able to find. I remember running into dialog boxes quite frequently with the cursed reminder that "this software requires a resolution of 640 by 480" or "this software requires the monitor to be set to 256 colors". None of these requirements could be satisfied on the compact Macintosh.

My next Macintosh was a compact with a 640 by 480 screen that could do 16-bit color. I no longer had the problem of inadequate screen resolution or color depth. Instead, I was now faced with having a woefully inadequate hard drive. You see, my second Macintosh had only a 160MB drive. So it was constantly full because I could now use all of that software that had been previously unuseable.

Yeah, life sucked as a Mac user.
LOL...my first Mac was a 512k back in '85. With my experience with this, and my TRS-80, when I bought my next Mac (a Classic II), I knew I wanted the most RAM possible (4MB), but when I saw the choices of a 40MB or 80MB drive, I was there like, "Geez, I'll never fill up a 40MB hard drive."

Well...I started having all the problems pee-air described above...and then when I bought my Performa 6116, with a 700 MB drive...well, let's just say that one copy of Marathon and one copy of Dark Forces, and CodeWarrior, and...I was screwed...

Ahh, the good old days!

 

lee4hmz

Member
The newer ACARD SCSI IDE bridges don't have this limitation, the older ones do.
It's a limitation of the IDE controller that is on the bridge, not on the computer. SCSI doesn't handle drive sectors directly, and the limitation is with IDE's Logical Block Addressing Scheme. All SCSI sees is a big storage space with read/write and other instructions.

That's why SCSI drives are more expensive: All the disk controller activity is in the drive's electronics in SCSI, in IDE it's on the motherboard. Sort of like comparing full modems and Express Modems (and WinModems).
Not quite, in this case. The controller/drive dichotomy died with ESDI back in the early 1990s; all drives these days have full controllers on them. The real issue is what the host adapter is capable of.

Some HAs set up DMA transactions such that they need to know the block addresses on the drive, and because LBA48 is "overloaded" on the bus using stacked writes (just like the row and column addresses on DRAM), the hardware either needs to know how to stack the addresses, or needs to ignore them entirely and only DMA the data in and out (IIRC Intel's chipsets do the latter). For bridge boards, it depends on their internal wiring and how the firmware sets up IDE commands; it could require a hardware update in som.e cases, but most of the time a firmware patch will do.

There's actually an analogous situation in SCSI-land; it'd be like having a really old bus-mastering SCSI HA (or a SCSI-ST506 bridge, for that matter) that can't handle I/O past READ(6) or WRITE(6). (The 10-byte versions support 32-bit LBAs and have been in SCSI since 1987, so this would be pretty unlikely, but still.)

 
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