• Hello MLAers! We've re-enabled auto-approval for accounts. If you are still waiting on account approval, please check this thread for more information.

External hard drive replacement

i have a scsi external hard drive that was DOA from a eBay find, and was wondering if there was a cheap way to get a new drive because all the adapters are expensive. I'm looking at under $50 for every thing

 
You can retrofit an SCA drive in its place with the adapter, that will work. 

But keep in mind there are certain macintosh models (powerPC comes to mind) that have a SCSI Manager that sees the drive for actually what it is, and it wants to run in 16 bit mode which it cant do so it will lock up the whole machine. 

All 68K models work though. Some PowerPC models work. but the 6400/6500 for sure does not. 

 
uh, no. 20MB drives dont exist anymore that arnt vintage. You can partition it at 20MB, but it would be a waste. 

and the 20MB drives left in the wild, probably are dying or dead. actually the majority of old SCSI drives are dying off. unfortunately they are all senior citizens and they dont live forever. 

Without retrofitting what your asking for is impossible. Unfortunately. You may get lucky and find a working or NOS old school drive but your only delaying the inevitable = Failure. 

 
Last edited by a moderator:
CF to SCSI is uncommon and the one adapter I can think off off hand (the aztecmonster) is very expensive. SCSI2SD would be better.

 
Hang onto your money for a little while and set aside until you can afford a SCSI2SD.

Or, buy random SCSI hard disks on eBay with the hopes that they'll work.

 
^ That's good advice (the first part) ^

Like others mentioned, even the newest smaller capacity drives are going to be at least 20 years old at this point and it's a crapshoot as to how long they'll stay working.  I've got a stack of 80MB Quantums and it seems like every time I go through them to make sure they're still all working another one has died or is in the process of dying.  I like keeping things original, including hearing the noise from a hard drive, but have resigned myself to the fact that eventually I'm going to have to go solid-state if I want to keep the machines going.

 
Can you mount a SCSI2SD to the old Apple drive sleds directly or does it require an adapter? Just curious...

 
SCSI2SD.  You can pick them up on Inertial Computing's site for ~$64 shipped (if you're in the US) and MicroSD cards 4GB and smaller should be very inexpensive.  It might seem like a large outlay up front but this is something that once you buy it, you're set for (likely) the life of the machine.

EDIT: fix the link

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top