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Metrophage
New Member
Tonga
54 Posts |
 Posted - 08 Aug 2003 : 21:13:02
As I have become more ov a PPC end-user, and running out ov drive space on every box here- I have been psyched to see big SCSI drives for much cheeper than I used to like two, three years ago.
What confuses me now, is that the best drives I find are often 80-pin SCA type. I do often see various adaptors for 80> 68 or 80> 50 pins… but that seems weird to me. Why not just use an 80-pin SCSI card? My hard drives aren't some afterthought peripheral that I only hook up once in a while, they are core pices ov the system!
So, no adaptors, weird cables. I'd love to hear from cats who use an 80-pin SCSI >CARD< for their drives, or at least recommendations for some! |
Unknown_K
Full Member
USA
602 Posts |
Posted - 09 Aug 2003 : 00:30:55
There are no 80 pin scsi controller cards. 80 pin scsi drives are used in servers that have hot swap sca drive carriers. On the back of these carriers is a 68 pin interface scsi 3 or better. Some of the extra pins provide power and ground and probably sense when I drive is added or removed.I have an 18gb sca drive in my Q840av that has a 80 to 68/50 adapter and is used at the moment on the internal 50 pin cable (untill I get an UWSCSI card for the nubus slot). Not all sca to 68/50 pin converters work well, if your going to use one try to get one with an active termination setup since they usually work better with macs. I also have a bunch of 50/68 pin scsi hard drives which are what i use on most macs. there are numerous programs that will format these non mac rommed drives on you mac. For my PPC macs 8500 & 7500 I went totally with IDE drives using a PCI ata/66 card in both of them which even has a bootable 48x cdrom drive. If your really crazy you can find a IDE to SCSI bride card from acard (I have one) that fits under a 1" ata/66 drive and turns it into a super fast scsi drive (68 pin, some do 50 pin) for nubus macs. The nubus machine will see them as a normal scsi drive, the carrier doesnt add much height to the drive (it will fit where normal 1.6" drive fit). 
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Metrophage
New Member
Tonga
54 Posts |
Posted - 09 Aug 2003 : 02:32:33
Greetz, Unknown_K!
Thanks for helping to clear the 80-pin SCA confusion, I was wondering what was going on with that!IDE is certainly another option. All ov my drives, SCSI and IDE are in the 1 GB- 8 GB range. I suppose the real advantage ov using an IDE bus would be that CDRW drives would be much easier to find. I wish I could find a cheep IDE>SCSI board which would fit in an olde 2.5" SCSI PowerBook! Formatting the drives has been weird. My second Barracuda was OEM Compaq. For some reason several times louder than any other Barracuda- or any other drive- I have heard. DiskSetup used to ignore it, saying: "can't initialize disk in an unsupported drive". I was able to get it to last week! I opened DS 2.0.3 in Resorcerer and duplicated the generic "SEAGATE,*" fSCR resource, and named it "COMPAQ,*". And it worked! The Compaq-version Barracuda ST15150N showed up as a supported drive, and I was able to load a new driver to it, format and partition it! Phat! Except that this week I have needed to do so again, and it no longer works! The new fSCR is still there, but the drive shows up as unsupported again! Weird. So I will need to find another way to format it. For XPostFacto use one spozedly needs to use DiskSetup or Intech Speedtools. We'll see, I will try messing around with DS some more.
Gots to see an SCA drive carrier! Thanks for the helpful info!
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80-Pin SCA SCSI Cards?
68k of the Week: kastegir's PowerBook 180.