On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 06:54:52AM +0100, Iggy Drougge wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Louis Schulman wrote:
> > OK, here is a very elementary question that has always
> > stumped me. Is there any difference between an external
> > SCSI hard drive made for a Mac and a generic SCSI hard
> > drive? Can I hook up a Mac SCSI hard drive to some other
> > computer with a SCSI interface and expect it to work (after
> > formatting, of course)? What about the other way around?
>
> The first alternative works very well indeed. The second won't, though.
> Macs use hard drives with a particular Apple firmware, without which HD SC
> Utility won't recognise the drive. Bloody stupid. Another Apple
I fixed it by using SCSI Director. But that's "classic" software,
not available new anymore. It can write a compatible firmware record
to any SCSI drive.
I'm not sure if this was just a means for Apple to sell drives; because
according to some official Apple tech notes I read somewhere, it was
necessary for a while for them to develop custom firmware for each
drive. This firmware can be thought of as the device driver for that
hard drive, part of the OS after a fasion. Maybe it took a while for
hard drive manufacturers to figure out how to be interchangeable,
so that a "universal" driver was possible? How new was the SCSI spec
when Macs first started using it?
--
_______ Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD ecloud_at_bigfoot.com
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Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 03:25:23 GMT