Largest hard drive in a 630?

[Clinton]

Welp, I have a client who (believe it or not) is still using his 630. He had a hard drive malfunction and we're replacing his drive for him, then dumping 8 on it.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any peculiarities with the 630, as far ask hard drive sizes and other such things, and caveats for the replacement of said drive. We've gone through about six drives and been unable to initialize them with Drive Setup on both the 7.6.1 and 8.0 install CDs.

Anyway, thanks in advance!

CCC

 

[shu82]

The fastest HD you can use on these machines is a PIO 3 standard, which is early ATA-2 drives. On the drive itself it should not list a speed higher than 11.1 mbps. or a cycle time of less than 180 NS. This should be located on the sticker on the drive.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=16335

It looks like you need to hunt down an old PC to scrap.

Also, the OS limits your partitions to 2gb each.

 

[equill]

... Also, the OS limits your partitions to 2gb each.

Surely that is not the case under either 7.6.1 or 8.0? In 7.1.2P to 7.5.1 there are limits in the OS, certainly. It can well be imagined that the other conditions in artnum=16335 are inherent in the IDE controller rather than the OS.

de

 

[LCGuy]

Pretty much any drive 120GB or less should be fine. Before I put a Performa 5260 board in my 630, I used a 2002 vintage Western Digital 40GB 7200rpm drive from my 2003 Dell in it, and it worked perfectly.

You'll want to put 8.1 on there for him, so that you can use HFS+ volumes. A 68k cannot boot from a HFS+ volume, or use it for VM, but it can access a HFS+ volume without a problem. What I'd do if I were you would be to make a 1 or 2 GB HFS volume, to hold the system and applications, and then format the rest as HFS+.

 

[shu82]

the 630 was the very first ide controller in a mac. It has limitations. Perhaps the poster above had a drive that downgraded itself to work at that speed. It is a good idea to try older hard drives in this process.

I don't know about OS 8 but OS 7 does limit me to 2 gb per partition perhaps it's my controller. Seriously though this does affect the macs described in the apple note I linked above. This was new tech at the time, there was limitations of the ide controller.

Personally if I were you clinton, I would add a nubus scsi controller and put a big 18 gig in it. Also charge 300 for your trouble and parts. These are 15 year old machines, he should be praising the lord his computer has lasted this long. If it has lasted this long it will last another 15 years!

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

I've happily used a 40GB Seagate ATA/33 disk in a 630 before. It's a bit of a waste if you run anything earlier than OS 8.1 on it mind you.

The key issue is *partitions* are limited to 2GB in early OS versions, I think they went up to 4GB at 7.6 or 7.6 (can't remember which) and at 8.1/HFS+ they went up to something silly. The physical capacity of the *disk* is not limited by these factors so much as you can have many 2GB partitions on a larger disk (I used to run 18GB disks in my 840av in 7.1 with 9 partitions each ). I think there is an upper limit on the number of partitions classic Mac OS can handle, but it's something bigger then you'd ever fit on your desktop I'd guess. I'd probably shoot for a 8GB or 16GB at most. Anything larger is gonna be wasted on a 68k era machine, even with FAT binaries the stuff was way smaller than anything on OS X these days.

 

[LCGuy]

That would be System 7...IIRC, releases prior to 7.5.5 (??) were limited to only 2 GB partitions.

Also, sadly, since the LC630 has no NuBus slot, and there are no LC PDS NuBus controllers, he cannot add a NuBus SCSI card, though its not that big an issue, the 630, like most 68ks has a SCSI controller built in. (and unlike what they say, it DOES support SCSI Manager 4.3)

For the record, that drive wasn't the only modernish drive i've had in my Performa...I've used it a lot for testing wayward IDE HDDs that I find from old machines, and its never let me down.

 

[Aoresteen]

We've gone through about six drives and been unable to initialize them with Drive Setup on both the 7.6.1 and 8.0 install CDs.
Anyway, thanks in advance!

CCC

I've only used IDE drives with OS 9 & 10 so I might be wrong on this.

Drive setup 1.x may need to patched to work with non-Apple drives.

http://www.euronet.nl/users/ernstoud/drvsetup.html

http://lowendmac.com/sable/07/0425.html

 

[Anonymous Freak]

The 630 requires "Internal HD Format", which is specific to the 630. Although a hacked Drive Setup from OS 8 should be able to do the job.

There are two types of limits involved with the 630. The first is an IDE/ATA limit. ATA-2 only supports up to 132 GB, which really means 120 GB (nobody made any drives between 120 and 132 GB.) Any drive under that should be recognized just fine. Any drive larger than that, and you would give up any capacity over 132 GB, and would require that the drive have a "132 CAP" or similarly-named jumper set on it. (Some newer drives don't have this, and would not work at all.)

The second limit is, as SilValPir mentions, is software. Depending on the version of the MacOS, your partition size may be limited. You can 'get around' this by just using multiple partitions. One problem is that you have to use HFS for the boot partition on a 68040, although data partitions can be HFS+ on a 68040 system. (So you could have OS 8.1 on a 2 GB HFS partition, and the rest of the drive as one big HFS+ partition for apps and data.)

 

[Quadraman]

Wouldn't a 7200 RPM drive be overkill in a 630? I thought the bus would become saturated before you reached the transfer limit of a fast IDE drive and the heat generated by a 7200 RPM drive in the small space inside a 630 might also be something to consider.

 

[LCGuy]

The 630 requires "Internal HD Format", which is specific to the 630. Although a hacked Drive Setup from OS 8 should be able to do the job.

IIRC, Internal HD Format is only for System 7.1.2. For System 7.5.x onwards, Drive Setup will do the job, and you don't even need a hacked version. I just use the version that comes on the OS 8 CD, and it works fine.

For the record, 7200rpm drives do just fine in a 630.

 

[register]

I remember installation of a 20 GB HDD in a Performa 630. Using drive setup I could not get partitions in different HFS/HFS+ format. In the need for a HFS boot partition I made all partitions HFS, regardless of the 8.1 HFS+ capability. How can one work around this issue ?

 

[TylerEss]

Wouldn't a 7200 RPM drive be overkill in a 630? I thought the bus would become saturated before you reached the transfer limit of a fast IDE drive and the heat generated by a 7200 RPM drive in the small space inside a 630 might also be something to consider.

Actually, a 40GB WD Caviar might be a good choice. The added spindle speed doesn't go to waste at all... I've got benchmarks showing a Mac Classic booting faster from a drive with a lower seek time!

You're totally right about saturating the low transfer rate of the controller, but the seek time still makes a huge difference.

The heat concern is real with older drives, but with modern ones with FD bearings, they're cool and quiet; probably moreso than the stock 4500RPM drive.

 

[coius]

I used to use a 5400RPM 20GB Laptop drive (with adapter) in my LC630. Same thing, but with OS 8.1 and HFS, I was able to use the whole thing. Not bad though... I would love to get my hands on a classic mac again, but from what my friend said, that may be soon (He hit the mother-load with unopened 5.25" Apple ][ Floppy controller and a bunch of unopened software and manuals for Apple II series computers)

I hope I get a color classic, but I *may* be getting a PowerBook 160 or 140. I forgot which...

 

[Richard]

I remember installation of a 20 GB HDD in a Performa 630. Using drive setup I could not get partitions in different HFS/HFS+ format. In the need for a HFS boot partition I made all partitions HFS, regardless of the 8.1 HFS+ capability. How can one work around this issue ?

Interesting that you were not able to have both HFS and HFS+ partitions on the same drive. Has this happened to anyone else?

 

[Outlander]

So long as you are using 8, you can use pretty much any hard drive you want. I've heard of incompatibilities with certain models, but for the most part that "incompatibility" has been user error. Seagate 40GB ATA 133 installed in my frankenstein 6200 right now running just fine. In fact, I don't think I have ever had an issue with 99% of seagate products. As far as a size limit, unless they sell 4TB 3.5" HD's yet, then there really isn't a limit.

EDIT: Didn't see that this was an old message, sry.

 

[johnklos]

To summarize, ANY drive will work, and the only limitations to consider are the 128 gig limit and the filesystem limits.

You can put in a larger drive, but the machine will only see 128 gigs; I often use 160 gig drives so I can get the FULL 128 gigs, because 120 gig (10^9) drives actually give about 110 gigs (2^30).

If you make a modest HFS partition at the beginning of the drive of, say, 1 gigabyte and install Mac OS 8.1 on it, you can then use as much of the remaining disk with an HFS+ partition.

All modern drives will run at the slower IDE bus speed. Also, there aren't any drives these days which take more power than the old, original drives. Most take a lot less, even at 7200 RPM.

 

[Outlander]

The limit is 4TB's, not 128gig's. If need be, I'll install and format a 160gb IDE drive just to prove the point

 

[johnklos]

Please do. The limit on m68k Mac IDE is 128 gigs due to the fact that the IDE of the time supported 28 bit addressing giving 2^28 (268,435,456) sectors of 512 bytes each for 137,438,953,472 bytes total, or 128 gigabytes, or what some people nowadays call 128 gibibytes.

IDE drives with 48 bit addressing can access 2^57 bytes (2^48 + 9 bits in a sector), or 144,115,188,075,855,872 bytes, or 128 petabytes.

Not sure where the 4 terabyte number comes from, since legacy SCSI is limited to 2 terabytes... But I'd love to learn more, especially if I'm wrong!