Most common upgrades for an SE?

[tomlee59]

Strictly speaking, no mods are needed to put in a 3.5" HD on top of the floppy drives, if you don't mind a bit of a kludge. There's enough room to place the HD on top of the floppy drives. Use your favorite fastening method to keep the HD in place (I used a combination of cable ties and duct tape). This way, you can have two floppies and a hard drive all together. Doesn't look pretty inside, but who's to know?

 

[Unknown_K]

Duct tape is the last thing I would use in a computer.

 

[Bunsen]

Agreed. Industrial Velcro all the way.

 

[Patrickool93]

Double-sided tape.

 

[equant]

Duct tape is the last thing I would use in a computer.

Really? For me it'd be something like urine, or a grizzly bear.

 

[TylerEss]

A grizzly bear would actually be a great method, except that grizzly bears small enough to fit in an SE are becoming extremely rare these days...

The nicest-looking way to do it is with a drill; Remove the "upper" floppy cage and empty it. Locate the hard-drive bottom-mounting screws and drill holes for them. Use flush-head screws to screw the hard drive in place, then put the floppy drive back in the cage. Mount the whole shebang back in place and you're done.

 

[Maccess]

Thanks for the tips. I think I will leave the 800k floppy drives alone and concentrate on putting in a harddrive. I will keep an eye on ebay to pick up an upgrade for a little added speed!!

I would say it's more interesting with dual floppy drives. No sense taxing the power supply with a power hungry hard drive. treat it gently like a wise old man.

If you'll need a hard drive, try to find one of them Mass Micro Single or Dual 5.25" drive cases.

Up the RAM, add Ethernet, but I wouldn't really go much beyond that, unless one can find a plug in accelerator.

 

[Mac128]

As for HDs, I would say the issue is authenticity or productivity. I personally have put 2.5" HD is a Color Classic case and they work very nicely because they are very low power and take up minimal space. The SCSI adapters allow you to use a PowerBook drive from the era, but you can also get a SCSI/IDE adapter and use a much larger capacity IDE/ATA 2.5 in there. Also possibly easier to find and cheaper.

 

[Maccess]

A high capacity IDE drive in a 68000 Mac?

Interesting concept. With the maximum partition size for System 6 around 2GB, how many partitions would you need for a 40GB drive?

I would think that to be more productive, it might make more sense to get a much faster mac: like an 040 Mac.

But to be cool, an SE or SE/30 with Ethernet is tops.