Hard Drive Compatibility

[benjgvps]

http://www.cdw.ca/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1163141&ContractID=0

Would this work in my PowerBook 150? Would it improve battery life? Would it be any faster?

 

[JRL]

I wouldn't count it on bing usable with the Drive Setup utility. MAYBE a patched copy, though.

 

[SiliconValleyPirate]

If it were up to me I'd use CF cards, they are more standard, faster in some cases, and come in larger sizes. CF is actually ATA based, so adapters from CF to IDE cost next to nothing. you cna even get them made up to fit straight to a laptop 44-pin (female) IDE header.

That dohicky will likely work but you'll need to somehow adapt it from 40-pin to 44-pin IDE. that'd cost almost as much as buying a CF->IDE adapter.

 

[JRL]

You'd have to buy a industrial-grade CompactFlash card, however.

 

[benjgvps]

There is a few problems with using a CF card adapter in the 150. I don't know why. Though this should act as a normal hard drive. There is a 44 pin version. I will find that.

EDIT: If I do get a 44 Pin version, will I be able to initialize it with the built in drive setup? Would there be a utility I could squeeze onto the PowerBook 150's Utilites floppy (After deleting everything not related to booting)?

 

[Bunsen]

You'd have to buy a industrial-grade CompactFlash card, however.

Well, you don't have to, but they would certainly last longer. From what people have been saying around here, a CF card that supports UDMA should be bootable.

However, as you'll see here, putting one in a 150 has a couple of wrinkles.

 

[JRL]

However, industrial-grade CF cards contain "Fixed Disk Mode" which bypasses the need to do what the author of the article did.

 

[benjgvps]

So would the 44 pin drive that I posted work? It seems that it should act like a normal every day hard drive as the disk is fixed, so like JRL said will bypass the things that that user had to go through. I also need a recommendation on a formatting program for it too. I have heard of Silverlining, but don't know where I can get it for System 7.1 (What is on the utilities disk for the PowerBook I have). Would I be able to format it in my PC if I connected it to a USB to IDE adapter with the right number of pins and have it recognized by the PowerBook?

 

[JRL]

I have a copy of Silverlining, but it typically won't work well with IDE HDDs.

 

[benjgvps]

Hmm, is there a way to patch the drive setup to read any disk? I saw a site that involved ResEdit and you could add the name, but is there a way to just to make it work with anything?

EDIT: http://lowendmac.com/sable/07/mac-drive-setup-patch.html

I bet I could get this to work.

 

[JRL]

Yeah, it's really easy; you'd just have to use 7.5 and above to do an install.

 

[benjgvps]

I will use HD SC Setup as I think I can make it run on the Utilites floppy that comes with system enabler for the Powerbook. I also will have more room to work with than say, the network access disk.

 

[JRL]

You can't use HD SC Setup, as it is designed to be used for SCSI drives only.

 

[LCGuy]

The versions of Drive Setup that come with later versions of Mac OS (8.1 onwards) can format most 3rd party drives in my experience.

 

[register]

Would I be able to format it in my PC if I connected it to a USB to IDE adapter with the right number of pins and have it recognized by the PowerBook?

As long as you manage to put a standard HFS file system onto the disk it might work. Most PC disk utility software will not offer that option. You might try to find any Mac with a CF card reader / adapter and use a more recent version of the Mac's Disk Utility to make a HFS partition with classic driver. This works not with any disk or any old mac, but I was successful with this method several times.

 

[benjgvps]

Apple HD SC Setup can work with IDE drives, as it is on the Utilites floppy that came with my PowerBook. I was thinking about formatting it with Transmac as that works pretty well for the things I used it for (Emulation and looking at the backup of my iMac I made in disk copy), though I might try some things before I go out and buy a 40 to 44 pin IDE cable (Cheap one here that I might try http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.727 ).

 

[tomlee59]

I thought that the "SC" in HD SC Setup specifically referred to SCSI. But perhaps not?

 

[LCGuy]

AFAIK, it most certainly does, hence why Apple used "SC" in the names of the SCSI HDDs they used to sell.

 

[benjgvps]

I saw something about the name. It must have been something like the first SCSI hard drive that Apple made came with the utility, but when it became more popular and it support more devices, the name stayed. I think it was the SC20 hard drive (I could be wrong).