Performa 630 IDE Hard Drive Replacement

[LazarusNine]

Dear all,

I just have a quick question regarding hard drive replacement in a Performa 630. Since it's an IDE drive, can I replace the drive with any IDE drive, even those released recently, or is there some kind of antiquated version of IDE I am not aware of? I've tried to hunt down an answer elsewhere, but I wasn't coming up with anything. Obviously I have no illusions as to how slow the drive will go in such an old machine; I'm mainly interested if it will at least work. I am guessing I will also need a hacked version of the System 7 disk utility in order to be able to initialise the disk. Thanks in advance!

Regards,

LazarusNine

 

[Byrd]

Hi,

I've added large EIDE hard disks to my Q630 and its not minded one bit, that being both an 80 or 120GB drives, running OS 8.1 formatted as HFS+ so to not worry about partitioning issues on older operating systems.  I'm pretty sure I formatted the drive on a G3 Mac running OS 9 before plugging it into the 630.  

Cooling is poor in these cases though, so I wouldn't go for a hot running drive; for example some 7200RPM models do get quite toasty.  You could also pick up a $5 CF to IDE adapter and experiment with this.

JB

 

[LazarusNine]

Hello there,

Your suggestions are helpful - you've really cleared that up! I'll either use a low-capacity drive or pick up an IDE to CF (or SD) adapter. I currently use an IDE to CF adapter in one of my PowerBook Lombards and it works really well. Something to think about in any case!

Regards,

Steve

 

[Byrd]

No worries Steve - I've not taken the CF route in any of my Macs since I have a good supply of reliable 2.5" and 3.5" IDE HDs at my disposal, but they won't last hopefully keep going when 32GB CF cards are $20 each or something

 

[max1zzz]

If you wanted to go with something period appropriate I have a couple of 6.4GB Quantum IDE drives (as well as a load of drives in the 10-40GB range) If your interested in any of them let me know

 

[LazarusNine]

Hello max1zzz. Thanks for letting me know about that option. I may indeed take you up on that suggestion, but I want to first see the state of the drive that's in the machine when it arrives. I'll keep you in mind, though! 

 

[trag]

Sintech makes an IDE to MSATA SSD adapter for $10 - $15.   I guess on a machine at that age, the difference in performance between CF and MSATA SSD probably won't matter, but you might find the latter more generally useful in other machines than the CF.

 

[LazarusNine]

That's an interesting suggestion, trag. As you say, the cost of an mSATA SSD would put me off an adapter like that. That said, CF cards are quite expensive for what they are, particularly since I would need one with UDMA. I'll look into it and if I have any luck, I'll be sure to let everyone know. 

 

[trag]

Newegg has a couple of MSATA SSDs for under $40.  30 GB I think.   I haven't priced CF cards so don't know how they compare.

The sweet spot for MSATA SSDs seems to be about 240 GB for around $100 - $110 these days, but I don't know what you would do with 240 GB on a Q630.  

 

[LazarusNine]

I'm actually having a real difficult time with the IDE hard drive currently in my Performa 630. I have tried all of my install disks (I own floppies of 7.5.3 and 7.6) and I can't get any of them to finish an installation without a failure. All three sets of disks installed on my LC III without issue. The only thing I haven't tried are my 7.0.1 disks, but I don't know that this Mac is compatible with that OS. I'm wondering if it's an IO issue with either the drive or the floppy connector. This is the message I keep getting at DIFFERENT stages of the installation every time I attempt an install. Any thoughts?

 

[Elfen]

You need to partition the drive as HSF and not HSF+ for OS8 and under. And depending on the size of the drive maybe partition the drive into 2GB Slices.

Since you have a CF to IDE in your Lombard, you can have it in the 630 as well. Only thing, it has to be a Single CF Adapter as a Dual CF Adapter will not work.

 

[LazarusNine]

So, I've replaced the hard drive in the Mac thinking that might have been an issue. However, I still can't get any system installed on the thing. Having had little success with floppies, the *new* issue I've run into is that I can't install anything with a CD. I have a CD of Apple's 7.5.3 and the actual retail copy of 8.0 from a purchase we made back in the day. Neither CD spins up after the boot chime. I've tried different key combinations: Command-Option-Shift-Delete, Command-Option-Shift-3, 'C', etc. Nothing.

There's nothing physically wrong with the drive from what I can tell - I've even disassembled it and cleaned the laser head. The guy I purchased the 630 from was able to get a CD to show up on the desktop of the original install (I reformatted the drive, because the original installation of 7.5.3 was in French). I'm not sure if this is significant, but the model says on the front: "Performa 630", not "Performa 630CD", though it does has a SCSI CD drive installed with all of the appropriate Foxconn connections, etc. that allow it to plug into Apple's proprietary board. So, now I'm at a loss. Any suggestions?

 

[LazarusNine]

Hi,

I've added large EIDE hard disks to my Q630 and its not minded one bit, that being both an 80 or 120GB drives, running OS 8.1 formatted as HFS+ so to not worry about partitioning issues on older operating systems.  I'm pretty sure I formatted the drive on a G3 Mac running OS 9 before plugging it into the 630.  

Cooling is poor in these cases though, so I wouldn't go for a hot running drive; for example some 7200RPM models do get quite toasty.  You could also pick up a $5 CF to IDE adapter and experiment with this.

JB

Hello JB,

I am struggling to get the newer 160GB drive recognised by a patched version of the Drive Setup utility (v1.5), so I'm thinking that I need to do as you said - format the drive using another Mac before hand. Sigh...will have to pull the drive out of my MDD G4 temporarily! Will keep in touch. My CD issues (see previous post) still stand, which is a shame. It appears as a SCSI device in Drive Setup, but I can't get the Mac to seem to want to do anything with it.

Regards,

LazarusNine

 

[max1zzz]

I't possible your cd drive just died, the one in my 8600 pretty much went from working one day to not working the next

 

[Bunsen]

Pretty sure there's a hard limit of 128GB on those machines.

 

[LazarusNine]

@Bunsen Can I get around that with having two partitions of 80GB each, if that hard 128GB limit does indeed exist?

 

[johnklos]

If I remember correctly, there is no 128 gig limit on these machines. There certainly isn't a hardware limitation, since I've used drives much larger than 128 gigs. Mac OS will either see a larger drive as 128 gigs or as full size - they've always been smart enough to not have the "wrap-around" problem.

The reason there's no hardware limit is because IDE transfers are done via software, so there's no hardware controller which would have to support ATA commands for accessing more than 28 bits' worth of sectors (2^9 bytes per sector giving 2^37 bytes total, or 128 GB). But even if the ROMs don't support drives larger than 128 gigs (I might guess that booting from a partition passed the 128 gig mark wouldn't work), the OS certainly could.

BTW - I always found it easier to format using a PowerMac. Also, it won't run anything older than 7.1.

Give it a try and let us know.

 

[LazarusNine]

Sad news - it looks like the 160GB drive I got from Amazon was a dude. It can't be seen in my MDD Power Mac G4 either. So much for that! At least we know it's not the Performa. Luckily, max1zzz is helping out with a potential solution. I'll keep you all posted. I may eventually opt for the CF to IDE or perhaps SD to IDE adapter at some stage.

 

[Elfen]

*Scratches head* How big of a hard drive is needed, and what system are you running on it? I'm pushing for the SSD route (SSD or CF with IDE Adapter) because that will make the system faster and be cheaper up to a certain size. But the entire 68K Library is only so big (10BG or so) and you are stuck with either 68K or PPC/68K Fat software. I can not see one using over 32GB on a machine like this unless one is doing massive work on it! Plus in using FAT Software, you can use a PPC-Fat Striper to make the programs smaller for THAT Machine!

I use both 68K and PPC and use the Fat striper on the 68K Machines, making programs fit that did not it before. If the System is Fat (PPC and 68K) you can cut it in half by stripping the PPC code from it. Photoshop 4.0 is something over 8megs and its PPC/68K Fat, stripping that cuts it to under 5megs! So things that could not fit into 16megs of RAM now can. I'm just saying.

And some SSDs/CF-SSDs will not work on a Mac. A couple of members fell into that trap, but at the same time, a few hard drives will not work either and it looks like you fell into that trap too. Get a small hard drive and test it to see if it works first, then upgrade to a larger size - again testing to see if it works too. This also applies to a SSD/CF-SSD. For me on a 68K/PPC machine, the biggest SSD I have in it (WallStreet G3) is 8GB and the average is 4GB. OSX machines I have start out with 16GB as a minimum.