New Hard Drive for Powermac 7500

[pchristians]

Hi,

I want to replace the original hard drive of a powermac 7500 with a new one. It has the original SCSI 1GB drive. Is it possible to still find new SCSI drives?

I saw that there are controller cards available for the newer drives (ATA, SATA). However, I don't want to spend too much, so finding a new SCSI drive would suffice.

Can anyone advise me on what options I have? Is there a hard drive I can buy (New) that doesn't need a controller card?

Thank you.

 

[trag]

New SCSI drives with 50 pin connectors are either non-existent or very rare and likely to be expensive. They are, of course, available on the used market.

It is possible to adapt 68 pin (wide) and 80 pin SCA SCSI drives to use on a 50 pin (narrow) bus. However, you need a good understanding of SCSI termination to set the adapters (and to make sure you get the proper adapter) properly.

If you want a new drive instead of a used drive, it will probably be about as cheap to buy an ATA card and a new inexpensive ATA drive. Certainly, you will get more storage capacity and better performance that way. Your machine needs to have an available PCI slot though.

Outpost.com has frequently had a Seagate (5 year warranty) 320 GB ATA drive for $70 recently. If they don't right now, wait a week or two and they likely will again.

If you don't need really big drives, you might look for a used UltraTek/66 adapter card. They do not support drives larger than 128 GB, but they should be really cheap by now.

For really good support and compatibility get an Acard 6280M or 6880M.