I just dug out my hard drive for the LC III.

[facattack]

Anyone know what I can do with it? I bought a 50pin USB adaptor but it doesn't fit. I tried installing it into my Packard Bell 486 machine but the pin outs are different. I'll look up the drive & see if I can find some diagrams or something.

 

[porter]

If it's from an LCIII it'll be a 50pin SCSI.

 

[facattack]

Does Apple have a different attitude towards pin lay outs?

 

[LCGuy]

Um, no, its a standard 50 pin SCSI drive.

That USB adaptor is likely an external SCSI USB adaptor - you'll need to put the drive into an external SCSI box to get it to work. And that Packard Bell most likely uses IDE - completely different to SCSI.

 

[AvalancheSJ]

Um, no, its a standard 50 pin SCSI drive.
That USB adapter is likely an external SCSI USB adapter - you'll need to put the drive into an external SCSI box to get it to work. And that Packard Bell most likely uses IDE - completely different to SCSI.

Agreed, IDE is 40pin and SCSI is (usually) much faster and more reliable than IDE. a simple SCSI PCI card will suffice. they are cheap nowadays u can pick 1 up on eBay for like $1 + shipping. just be sure u don't get a 50 pin HD adapter that would make ur job really hard lol

 

[Bunsen]

There are two different kinds of internal 50 pin SCSI connectors, big and small (high density?). Yes, the one on the LC HD is standard, but if you bought a recent USB SCSI converter, it's probably the -other- standard.

Luckily they are electrically identical so you should be able to find a 50-50 converter on ebay for a few bucks.

You say you have a "USB 50 pin adapter" but you don't realise the drive is SCSI ... so what did you actually buy?

 

[facattack]

There are two different kinds of internal 50 pin SCSI connectors, big and small (high density?). Yes, the one on the LC HD is standard, but if you bought a recent USB SCSI converter, it's probably the -other- standard.
Luckily they are electrically identical so you should be able to find a 50-50 converter on ebay for a few bucks.

You say you have a "USB 50 pin adapter" but you don't realise the drive is SCSI ... so what did you actually buy?

I thought it was SCSI that I had gotten from the Mac but someone mentioned above that it's a IDE hard drive on the Packard Bell. In an earlier post I mentioned how my fuses on the LC III were burned out because of plugging a parallel port zip drive into the SCSI drive.

I don't know why I'm bothering with the hard drive. Just that I didn't have a chance to look at all the data on it before I fried the fuses. Oh well.

But anyway, when held up next to the "SCSI" output on the Mac hard drive, the 50 pin adaptor looks smaller with fewer pins.

 

[porter]

But anyway, when held up next to the "SCSI" output on the Mac hard drive, the 50 pin adaptor looks smaller with fewer pins.

You can't have two 50pin connectors with one having "fewer pins". At least one of them evidently isn't 50pin.

Laptop drives often have 44pin connectors which are IDE + power.

 

[register]

There are several kinds of "some more recent connector" to SCSI converter available, as there are USB-SCSI, FireWire-SCSI, Cardbus-SCSI, IDE-SCSI, SATA-SCSI (!). The first and second ones were a little common with iomega devices some years ago. I would not recommend to go for that as they seem to be picky about the storage device connected and they might need some drivers not available for recent system software (for example: I could not get one of several iomega SCSI-FW converters to work with a SCSI hdd with Mac OS X or several kinds of Windows).

 

[lee4hmz]

Iomega stuff tends to be designed especially for their devices (Zip and Jaz drives), and I wouldn't recommend trying to make it work with anything else. As for SCSI-IDE and SCSI-SATA bridges, the ACARD ones work extremely well but are a bit pricey (the one I'm eyeing for my 475 is $140).

Why bother? Well, pretty much any SCSI drive old enough to work with a 475 without adapters has bad or noisy bearings, and a new 15k monster would be massive overkill for such an old machine.

(ETA: Then again, if you can get a surplus 15k for free, it certainly changes things. I managed to dig up a 2002-vintage Seagate 18GB that works fine and is deadly silent while running.)

-lee

 

[thinkdifferent]

Anyone know what I can do with it? I bought a 50pin USB adaptor but it doesn't fit. I tried installing it into my Packard Bell 486 machine but the pin outs are different. I'll look up the drive & see if I can find some diagrams or something.

The LC III uses a 50 pin SCSI internal connector, and a 25 pin DB-25 external SCSI connector. The LC III originally came with either an 80 MB or 160 MB Hard Disk.