Quadra 610: In the Throes of Hard Drive Doom

[ross]

Booted up a beautiful Quadra 610 to find the ? Disk flashing on screen. I got it to boot up properly a couple times, but it's pretty much on its last legs, making tons of reading noises.

I searched the forums and couldn't find anything on my question: What kind of 3rd party SCSI drive works well in one of these machines and where's the best place to get it?

Thanks

:O Ross :O

 

[TheNeil]

I've always found that Seagate drives seem to work well but for any non-Apple logo'd drive you're going to have to prepare it with either a third party app or a patched version of the Apple's HD Setup.

As to where to get one from...depends on where you are

 

[porter]

Also may be worth getting some "80pin to 50pin" or "68pin to 50pin" convertors, so you are not limited to original 50pin drives.

 

[leosadvs]

Also may be worth getting some "80pin to 50pin" or "68pin to 50pin" convertors, so you are not limited to original 50pin drives.

wow!.. i dont know that thing existed! 8-o

 

[ross]

thanks for the info. will look into options!!

 

[sylwiusz]

wow!.. i dont know that thing existed! 8-o

Yes, it did. But we must remember that LVD drives require external quality termination and that can become problematic. Sometimes it is just better to buy for about 10$ ATTO Silicon Express IV or FWB Jackhammer with wide, 68 pin sockets and cheap, terminated LVD cable - as a bonus we'll get much better disk performance

 

[ross]

Sometimes it is just better to buy for about 10$ ATTO Silicon Express IV or FWB Jackhammer with wide, 68 pin sockets and cheap, terminated LVD cable

I guess I could go count the pins, but doesn't the Quadra use 50-pin SCSI? $10 sounds right up my alley, though.

Wait, those are the names of adapters? I'm searching around and not finding much on ebay.

I am total noob.

 

[sylwiusz]

Yes, Quadra uses 50-pin SCSI. Adapters mentioned by me are nuBus cards - Quadra 610 probably needs NuBus adapter to use them (unless you already have it inside Quadra). With either of these cards you'll achieve about 2x performance compared to builtin SCSI and you'll be able to connect newer, faster, quiter disks. These cards you can buy for instance here:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=160143538011

 

[ross]

Thank you. I was looking at 50 to 80 pin adapters and those would cost about the same and probably maintain or reduce speed.

I'm becoming increasingly excited about getting this thing working, but I'm still stuck on how to get files off of there. There's no network card, no modem to speak of, obviously no USB port and all my other computers are PC's. I've looked around for freeware programs to read mac fl oppies but HFSexplorer won't open a floppy disk.

I'm a writer and I plan to use the Quadra as my main writing computer but I need to make sure I can get my stuff off of there on a regular basis for backups and printing and that sort of thing, so file formats and file systems are a big concern. HMMMMM.

 

[ross]

Also thinking about using the zip 250 drive i have. Unable to test it out yet, though, because it froze up the OS when I booted from Install CD. heheh.

 

[sylwiusz]

Thank you. I was looking at 50 to 80 pin adapters and those would cost about the same and probably maintain or reduce speed.

As I said - 50 to 80 adapter would be quite cumbersome to mount and it would require some hassle with proper bus termination. Get ATTO SE IV and you can easily connect any modern, 68-pin LVD drive + LVD cable for cheap. As a bonus you'll get about 2x performance of builtin SCSI.

I'm becoming increasingly excited about getting this thing working, but I'm still stuck on how to get files off of there. There's no network card, no modem to speak of, obviously no USB port and all my other computers are PC's. I've looked around for freeware programs to read mac fl oppies but HFSexplorer won't open a floppy disk.

To write Mac disks on the PC you can try this method:

http://macfaq.org/software/macos.shtml#Q1.1.6

And Quadra 610 should have AAUI ethernet port - all you need to connect it to your home networ is proper (and again cheap) adapter - probably the one for twisted pair cable. They are popular and easy to spot on eBay.

I'm a writer and I plan to use the Quadra as my main writing computer but I need to make sure I can get my stuff off of there on a regular basis for backups and printing and that sort of thing, so file formats and file systems are a big concern. HMMMMM.

Word 5.1a or Wordperfect 3.5 (freee) - both nice and very competent word processors. If you get an AAUI adapter, then exchanging data with PCs shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Bunsen]

If it has all the right operating system bits installed, the 610 will also quite happily read/write to a previously PC-formatted floppy.

50 pin drives are still commonly and inexpensively available on ebay up to about 4.5GB in size, less commonly to about 9GB. If you want bigger you'll need an adapter. There are a few sellers around who would be able to sell you both the drive and adapter together, sometimes tested together and ready to go into a Mac (although they charge a premium to do so).

If your main use will be word processing, I would think anywhere between 1GB and 4.5GB should be plenty, especially once you've got network access.

Beware the taller, older Seagate Barracudas - they sound like an angle grinder colliding with a working jet engine.