Apple external SCSI drives

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Wed Jan 10 07:31:18 2001

> 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
> peculiarity would be its lack of support for remote start in
> SCSI, so the hard drives will need to jumpered for automatic start on
> power, but this won't affect other systems.

Non-Apple drives work quite well with Macs; however, while your
observation about the use of Apple's HD SC Utility is correct,
all non-Apple SCSI drives sold *FOR* the Mac come with their
own SCSI setup utility.

For a SCSI drive *NOT* sold _for_ a Mac, you'd need a third-party
toolkit like FWB' Hard Disk Tools (or whatever it's called). I've
used it to add IBM and DEC SCSI drives to a Mac.

regards,
-dq
Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 07:31:18 GMT

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