If you could pick and choose any expansions and modifications, what would you do? Without taking into account price or rarity.
Personally, I like "close to stock feel, but smoother/quieter." RAM is good, though 128MB is arguably overkill. Personally I'd probably stick with 64, because IIRC to fit 128 in you have to bend the frame. (I may be wrong here).
Never bothered personally, though some people really like them. Being able to boot from a ROM disc is quite nice, especially if you've got lots of RAM. Note, though, that the Mac ROM-inator II boards are very very slightly the wrong width for the ROM SIMM slot (imperial vs. metric PCB thicknesses, I believe) and so can cause trouble. People have resorted to using elastic bands: one person on this forum made very nifty 3D printed ROM clips to keep them in place.
My personal ideal SE/30 can run A/UX, and accelerators are likely to muck about with that. But if you want "the 040 compact mac that never was", then you can do this. I keep a vague eye on accelerators but haven't bought one.
Thoughts on
MacSD or
SCSI2SD ?
People have had repeatable issues with the scsi2sd v6 in SE/30s, to the point where I'd hesitate to either recommend one for that purpose. v5s seem to work OK. My MacSD only arrived on Friday so I haven't had a chance to try it with an SE/30 yet, but other folks on here say it works. Note that the MacSD comes with a mount for the drive bay, the scsi2sd doesn't.
If I were getting one of these, I'd probably get one of
@Bolle's combination ethernet/cache adapter cards, as someone else mentioned upthread. Ethernet is handy, and in an "ultimate" build definitely should be in there, but pragmatically speaking, you can get quite a long way with LocalTalk and a bridge (you don't have to buy a dedicated bridge, you can use another Mac with ethernet to do it if you have one around).
Videocard för grayscale?
Grayscale on the internal monitor always feels a bit odd to me. I really like the high contrast black and white, so I'd probably leave that as is.
Original casing or the clear case from MacEffects?
The clear case is a really nice thing. It is not to my personal æsthetic taste, so I have no particular desire to get one myself, but for those who like how it looks it is a very nice upgrade.
@maceffects did a really nice job as far as I can see.
Recreating the Micron Xceed? As in building a copy of the card itself? What does this card provide?
This is the greyscale card that can (if you can find the right gubbins) do greyscale on the internal screen. Sought-after and expensive, hence the urge to clone it for people who want something to work rather than something 100% vintage.
The SE/30 doesn't have a video output, so I guess you would need a card to be able to run an external display. I saw a Classic for sale with a big screen, would a card from the classic work in the SE/30?
Yup, you would need a video card in the SE/30 to drive an external monitor. Various options are available. It does need to be an SE/30 card, though, so a card for a Classic won't work. The compact Macs never had a "standard" expansion bus, unfortunately.
If you want something a bit funky, there are also SCSI based external video "cards". Mostly designed for PowerBooks, but they'll work with desktops too.
Is there any downside with the SCSI Based ethernet?
SCSI Ethernet is really useful, especially if you have multiple older Macs that you tend to only use one at a time
. It's not quite as fast as internal, but then the files you're going to be transporting onto and off an SE/30 probably aren't enormous, so in practice it doesn't matter that much.
I think one of the reasons why this is such an interesting thing to talk about is that you have very real physical space constraints in there, and especially the video card / network / accelerator trio, as far as I know you can only really have two (and even then your choice is somewhat constrained).
