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External Mac SCSI Drives

falter

falter

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Dumb question.. are Apple branded external SCSI Drives able to be adapted to bigger drive sizes (temporarily). I have a 330gb HP drive that someone stuffed into a Bell and Howell Disk II chassis and want to connect to a Mac to see what's on it. But none of my Macs have enough power for two drives, and of course the drive uses a 50 pin connector while the external connector on a Mac I think is 25 pin. I'm wondering if I can temporarily open my 160SC and connect it to this 330?
 
I assume you mean 330 MB, there was never a 330 GB 50 pin SCSI drive.

SCSI is generally SCSI, you can transplant larger drives into SCSI enclosures with lower capacity drives within limits. 68030 and older Macs have a 2 GB limit due to the HFS file system. 68040 Macs can do 4 GB with HFS+, but it's not recommended. Larger disks have more probability of data corruption when the system crashes.
 
Yes sorry.. 330mb.. not gb. Yeah I was just thinking I'd temporarily disconnect the 160mb in my 260sc enclosure and cable in this HP. I'm hoping it won't stress the power supply.
 
I have u320 SCSI drive at multi-hundred GB working just fine on PowerPC Macs.

The Mac itself can handle large drives, but the version of System Software and the specific Mac model may limit the maximum size.

I'm not sure what software you would need for the Mac to be able to mount a non-Mac drive, though. Usually a driver is required to be on the disk, in the first few sectors, which is installed either by Apple HD SC Setup (for an Apple-branded disk, which yours won't be), or a third party tool like FWB Hard Disk Toolkit. Installing a driver likely would format the drive (erase it), so don't do that unless you know what you're doing.

Otherwise, a 330MB drive will work just fine in that case you're asking about. Access to the data is another question.
 
This hard drive, if the label is to be believed, was in use with a MacTV. They could have been running Sys 8.. not really sure. I'll try hooking it up via the 160SC enclosure and just see what happens. Just wanted to make sure I wouldn't blow up the enclosure, as it hosts a 160mb drive I do have some useful stuff on.
 
falter said:
This hard drive, if the label is to be believed, was in use with a MacTV. They could have been running Sys 8.. not really sure. I'll try hooking it up via the 160SC enclosure and just see what happens. Just wanted to make sure I wouldn't blow up the enclosure, as it hosts a 160mb drive I do have some useful stuff on.
Click to expand...

You won't do anything to the enclosure. It will be fine.

The hard drive from a MacTV (I assume you mean Macintosh TV, black all-in-one) is likely running between 7.1 and 7.6.1. Those featured 68030 processors, which don't really support Mac OS 8.
 
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