Apple external SCSI drives

From: Iggy Drougge <optimus_at_canit.se>
Date: Wed Jan 10 09:14:56 2001

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Douglas Quebbeman 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
> > 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.

Granted, I forgot to mention that there are other SCSI setup utilities,
but why in the world would one need to buy a drive /for/ a particular
brand of computer? A hard drive is a hard drive is a hard drive.

> 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.

I've got an Apple-edition IBM drive in a IIcx here. =)
Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 09:14:56 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:33:47 BST