[G4] Swapping SCSI to IDE in G4 Sawtooth-HELP!

[Doug McNutt]

At 16:19 -0700 10/6/07, Jim S wrote:
> I was wondering if anyone would know how to swap out a SCSI hard drive with an IDE. The issue is that the connector and ribbon is different for a SCSI drive than it is for a IDE drive. At the moment there is a SCSI card that the 2 internal Hard drives are connected to.
>How do I change the ribbon/connectors and where, so that I can install the new IDE drive?

It's probably impossible to make that happen with a wiring change.

But I'm a bit confused. My Sawtooth G4 may be different from yours. With that in mind. . .

ATA (IDE was an older version that made the processor do the work) and SCSI have very different logic protocols that require different software and probably hardware. ATA is limited to 2 drives on a bus, SCSI supports 7.

The Sawtooth requires ATA for its internal busses each of which can support two drives. You can replace the Zip drive with an ATA disk but it's a bit of screwdriver work. You can have two ATA drives on the other bus.

SCSI just isn't there but you probably can find a PCI card that supports SCSI drives if you don't have all of the slots used up driving monitors as I do.

You can also find SCSI to Firewire boxes that might well be easier than finding a PCI card.

ATA drives remain cheaper than SCSI.

-- 
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