[G4] Power Mac G4 Hard Drive installation info request

John Niven senseamp at yahoo.com
Mon Oct 8 06:32:47 PDT 2007


Cecil,

I haven't followed this thread closely, but I think
you need to slow down here.

I love SCSI drives, they can be leading edge
performance but if they are, they are expensive. That
is why ATA drives are used. It sounds like your SCSI
hd has a 50pin connector. At best , it would be "Ultra
SCSI narrow" at 20MBytes/sec. This is very slow by
todays standards. The best PCI scsi card to use with
this drive would be an Adaptec 2930. This is supported
in OSX. It's a nice card if you have old SCSI
peripherals (scanners, cd burners, hard drives etc).

But I doubt that your drive is actually a 50pin, it's
too big! It's probably an SCA 80pin interface with an
adapter fitted to take it to 50pin. These SCA are
cheap and plentiful because they were used in RAID
array's by big servers. Not many normal systems can
use them without an adapter. I, personally, avoid
them.

All in all, it's simpler to fit a brand new ATA drive
to the internal bus. That has 39 pins (one is missing
to ensure it goes in only one way). For ~$60 you can
get a drive with greater than 128Gb, that your Mac
will recognize as 128Gb. 

However, if it is an 80 pin SCA then a different
adapter could convert it to a 68 pin SCSI-3 Connector.
Then depending on the drive, and the PCI scsi card you
use, it could go up to 360Mbytes/sec.

So, what is the Make/model number of your SCSI hard
drive? Does it have an adapter?

John





--- "cecilhal at netzero.net" <cecilhal at netzero.net>
wrote:

> Unless I made an error I counted 39 holes on the
> ribbon connector currently connected to my G4.  As I
> write this message I do not have access to my system
> to double check.  At any rate the connector on the
> SCSI card (that shipped with the new drive) is
> physically longer or wider than the connector on my
> system's ribbon.
> > _______________________________________________
> G4 mailing list
> G4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
>
http://listserver.themacintoshguy.com/mailman/listinfo/g4



       
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