Apple external SCSI drives

From: Douglas Quebbeman <dhquebbeman_at_theestopinalgroup.com>
Date: Wed Jan 10 11:11:35 2001

> > > 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.

Because the computer manufacturer's engineers, in their infinite wisdom,
decided their computer needed feature <X>...

For Pr1me minis, hard drives have to be able to support a sector size
of 2080 bytes, instead of or in addition to the usual 512-byte sector
support. With Apple, their *first* hard drive (a non-SCSI unit) had
things called disk tags that required drives that support a sector
size of 576 bytes (from memory, probably wrong).

I'm not defending the practice; while I assumed your remark was
rhetorical, not everyone in the audience may be as well-informed
as we are.

> > 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. =)

I've got one of those, too, and it looks *just* like the
non-Apple edition. Scary...

-dq
Received on Wed Jan 10 2001 - 11:11:35 GMT