u320 drives wont work

[jpolster2009]

I have 3 u320 ultra320 scsi drives 72 gb in size. I have a mac classic and Mac IIFX where the hard drives just recently died. connecting my 2gb 50 pin drive to these machines, they work fine. when i use a 50/68 pin adapter and connect the u320 drives, they dont work. They dont show up in drive setup or apple hd sc setup. on the iifx, when i disconnect the origional drive I cannot boot from CD either, like that orig drive does something special. help?

 

[Gorgonops]

Sorting out termination issues with 50-68 pin (or SCA) adapters can be a nightmare. A good adapter needs to provide active termination of the 8 data pins not used on the drive side (not all do), and you'll also need to properly terminate the entire chain at the last drive/adapter on the chain. I also *believe* that Macs require one *and only one* drive to supply termination power (memory's a bit rusty on that one), and not all adapter-u320 drives combinations can do that. (If the chain isn't terminated correctly that might explain why your CD drive doesn't work correctly without the onboard-terminated original drive installed.)

(Oh, and aaaand one more thing: Note that for u320 drives to work they have to support dual cabling modes. If the drives *only* work with u320 LVDS cabling then they won't work no matter what you do.)

 

[jpolster2009]

ill just throw the IIfx away then. no sense in keeping it around.. Thanks though. At least you confirmed i wasnt going insane.

 

[LCGuy]

Noooo!!!!! Don't throw away the IIfx...at least have a look around for another drive, preferably a native 50 pin SCSI drive. If you truly are done with the IIfx, at least offer it up on here for the cost of shipping. And last, but not least, if you do end up throwing it, PLEASE grab the RAM from it!

 

[Tempest]

Seriously! If anything someone here will use it for parts. I know I need RAM amongst other things.

Tempest

 

[CJ_Miller]

Well... u320 drives would appear a bit large to any IIfx system. I would guess that on OS of this vintage maxes out at a partition size of 2GB? Also the speed of modern SCSI drives is wasted on the older bus.

Is there any reason why you can't/won't use a smaller 50-pin drive? Maybe if you use a cracking good nubus SCSI card and special drivers or utilities you might get bigger drive support than normal, but this is a project. Unless you absolutely need huge storage on thing I advise using a "normal" hard drive.

And if this doesn't work out for you, there are many IIfx lovers here who would be more than happy to get it off your hands - try the Trading Post (or PM me!)

CJ

 

[jpolster2009]

I had the u320 drives laying around. I was going to create 1 gb partitions and waste the rest of the free space. I wont use 50 pin drives because I have no money to buy any. I hate to sound like an asshole but Im unemployed right now and im trying to build a mac collection for as cheaply as possible. Id like to maybe sell parts off the iifx and get my paws on a beige g3 or 9600 or something i guess. or a few more compact macs. like an se/30. i just cant pay much at all for things becuase I have no money.

 

[papa_november]

I'm having a problem like this too. I have one SCA drive that jams the SCSI bus no matter what, and I have another that refuses to work if you plug in a terminator (the drives themselves have no termination options). I don't think either of these drives are broken (they spin up and so forth), but there's definitely something wrong here.

If the problem is in the SCA adaptor, are there any out there that do termination of their own, and do it properly?

 

[CelGen]

If I recall, it was somewhere with the introduction of the Ultra320 SCSI drives that they started dropping backwards compatibility with older and slower SCSI buses.

I found this out first hand when I was trying to put drives in my Silicon Graphics Onyx and they were not showing up even though they worked fine in my later Origin 2000.

Considering that at the very least you require a mac with an 040 and 7.6 to partition and boot drives larger than 4gb, I would strongly recommend you look for a different drive. I'm sure you can find someone willing to trade drives at the very least. the IIfx is a very fine system.