>Right now, I'm pretty concerned about how to crack open the box
>without breaking
>it, so I can inspect the hard disk to see what it is, physically.
>Does anybody
>have a recipe for doing that?
Most Mac's, other than the earlier compact ones, are pretty
easy to open. Some don't even have screws holding the case lid on,
just pull tabs at the back of the lid. Others, such as the II
series, have little tabs that must be pushed in while lifting on the
lid.
>Moreover, I imagine I'll use one of the considerably larger IDE types I've set
>aside from PC use to replace the drives now in the machines. It's safe to
>assume, however, that NOT any IDE drive will work, since Apple Computers, Inc.
>didn't like folks buying hardware at a resonable price from someone
>else rather
>than allowing Apple to gouge them. (part of the MAC culture, I
>guess) I note,
>also, that the CDROM is SCSI. That being the case, I'd like to see whether
>there's room for a SCSI HDD in the box. There certainly is room in the system
>(logically). That would work even better, since I have lots of extra SCSI
>drives. Have any of you MAC gurus got experience with replacing MAC
>IDE drives?
The problems with using hard disks other than those provided
by Apple is pretty much limited to SCSI drives. I've never had a
problem with popping a 3rd party IDE drive into one. Unfortunately,
this also applies to SCSI CD-ROM's, though there are ways around that
for using 3rd party CD's as well. If your 630 already has an
internal CD-ROM it is likely to be an Apple drive anyway, so you
wouldn't have to worry about this. I'd personally stick with the IDE
hard disks so as to avoid the inability of formatting 3rd party SCSI
drives.
>It looks as though the drives in the boxes are 250 MB or so, which might be
>adequate for some things, but I doubt it would be adequate for internet
>activity.
Depends on what you're going to use. Netscape 3 is pretty
much as high as I'd go on that old of a machine, though versions up
to about 4.08 are usable on non-PPC Mac's. For light use, using
System 7.5.5 (which is available freely on the 'net), 250 MB isn't
bad. System 7.5.5, as has already been pointed out, is less RAM
hungry than 8.1 and it also takes up less disk space. That's what
I'd stick with on a 68k Mac.
Jeff
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Received on Sat Nov 17 2001 - 12:53:14 GMT