• Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.

Confirming incorrect information on the PB 170 wiki page

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
I was looking through the wiki and found 2 things on the PB 170 page that seem to be incorrect:
1. I can’t find any proof that this white edition 170 exists. Just a couple mentions on forums in the 2000s, no pictures.
2. It says that the HDD driver is in ROM, and that the drive can’t be practically upgraded. I’ve never heard this to be true, and I’ve heard of people getting BlueSCSIs, etc. working in these systems. Is there any truth in this?

Just trying to confirm before I go ahead and correct those.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Ah, ok. I’ll get those things corrected. That prototype image was the only one I could find when I checked, but I recognized what it was.

Edit: Done.
 
Last edited:

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
not having looked at the page:

It depends on what "HDD driver" means in this case, but, a good example of "can't be upgraded" is that as an '030, the PB170 doesn't have SCSI Manager 4.3 and can't use its features so you can't to the best of my knowledge, say, use >4GB volumes on it, even if you WishIWere system 8.1 onto it. (Though 7.6.1 itself supports up to 2TB volumes with the appropriate hardware... it's just that the appropriate hardware for that is "040s and newer")
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
The specific wording was as follows:
The PowerBook 170 has its hard disk driver in ROM. This makes upgrading its hard disk practically impossible.
This specifically is definitely not the case. SCSI manager details are definitely worth noting down somewhere, but you can definitely upgrade the drive to a point. I can't say I blame the guy who wrote that very much though, the page hadn't been updated since '09 :)
 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Oh gotcha, yeah I'd say it's fair to remove that wording. I'm pretty sure we knew even in 2009 it was possible to upgrade PowerBook hard drives, even if we hadn't written some of the limits down yet.

I mentioned this somewhere but a lot of the more generic pages are basically direct copies off of Wikipedia at the time, so I don't feel like we should feel guilty for fixing bad info.
 

3lectr1cPPC

Well-known member
Yeah, over the coming days I'll work through all the pages looking for anything obvious. I've already noticed that the SCSI drive replacements page has some catching up to do, it still talks about Artmix, who I don't even think still makes the PowerMonster cards. It also doesn't mention a thing about more recent projects like the BlueSCSI, RaSCSI, MacSD, etc.

There's also a good bit of subjectivity on that page, one example is a sentence mentioning how the SCSI-2-SD is the current best option. Sure, that may have been true at the time, but now there's plenty of options for plenty of use-cases, and well, "editorialization"
 

Corgi

Well-known member
The PowerBook 170 has its hard disk driver in ROM. This makes upgrading its hard disk practically impossible.
I'm wondering if this dropped a word, as it does make upgrading its hard disk driver practically impossible (short of somehow replacing the ROM).
 
Top