Ridiculous 3rd-party SCSI drive in my Mac Plus

[mrcity]

I decided I was about through with swapping disks 25 times while trying to load Photoshop 1.0.7, not to mention having to swap disks just to do other things like change settings or make a gradient. Sure it gives an authentic 1980s experience, but you only need to live it once! Here's my brief success story on adding a 3rd-party SCSI drive to a Mac Plus.

Having an eye for stuff I could use (in existing projects, mind you ) I scored an IBM-branded 8x external SCSI CD-ROM drive and five SCSI drives (3x SCSI-2 and 2x SCSI-3) from "Fred's Warehouse Of Wonder" (which sadly the scrapper finally tore through last month). I ripped out the old CD-ROM drive and replaced it with one of the SCSI-2 drives since that's what the guts supported. Turns out this was the trickiest part of the whole affair -- them internal cables be short! I matched the drive's jumper settings for SCSI ID with that of the enclosure (incidentally I set it to ID 6 since the Mac enumerates from highest first), hooked it all up, and powered it on with the system disk inserted.

The specific drive is a Seagate ST51080N clocking in at 1.08GB & 5400rpm. It was the first one I picked out of the five (and also the smallest). After booting to System 6 from floppy, I loaded in the "Utilities" disk obtained from rescuemyclassicmac.com which already comes with the patched version of Apple HD SC Setup required to install 3rd-party drives. It immediately recognized the new drive and asked me to initialize & format it. This procedure took approximately 20 minutes, after which time I showed this Mac more K's in one place than it had ever seen before:



I've read that this system can actually support up to 2GB in a single partition. Anyway, the folks at the North Dallas Area Retrocomputing meetup this past Saturday had fun loading it full of software from other disks for me. The one disappointment is I haven't been able to get System 6 properly installed on there yet. Maybe the install disk is corrupted, or maybe there's a problem with the drive for some reason. Unfortunately I don't have a means to make 800K floppies from another source to try in this Mac Plus (unless my Amiga 500 could somehow do it), so I'll either have to get it on the Internet somehow, try hooking the hard drive up to another system that supports more modern media, learning the Amiga trick... or else just replace the diskette.

It was delightful that this experience ran so contrary to those I've had with getting floppy disks/drives working for any of my old IBM PCs. Definitely truth to the old statement "It just works."

EDIT: Forgot to attach a picture of the drive itself. Here it is:

 

[KC9UDX]

SCSI is SCSI. The computer almost always doesn't care about any other details of the drive.

The only time you really run into trouble is if the drive is over 2Gb, but even then that's not always a big problem.

 

[RWallmow]

I have plenty of old (68k) Mac's humming away with 9.1, 18, 36, and even 75GB SCSI drives, prior to OS 7.5.3 you are stuck carving the drive up into 2GB partitions, beyond 7.5.3 it supports up to 2TB partitions, however the larger the partition, the larger the block size and a lot of space is wasted, there's also some fairly low arbitrary limit on the number of files on a partition (I forget the number off hand), which you can easily hit on large partitions, making their usefulness quite questionable lol.

 

[Osgeld]

using a scsi card in a pc and running basiliskII emulator under linux you can bootstrap a hard drive with the OS of your choice provided that the hard drive is already partitioned and formatted properly

also you can copy files to and from the drive via linux file managers (whith hfs utilities installed) or from the emulated classic OS with some settings (I used a "starter disk" hard drive image)

http://www.instructables.com/id/Install-system-70-software-on-a-classic-mac-using/

above is a link to an outdated tutorial I did, premises is the same just uses older ubuntu

 

[ClassicHasClass]

My Quadra 800 has a 18GB drive, but because it's in 7.1 some of the time for booting A/UX, I have 2GB partitions in it and it's sort of a pain.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

SCSI is SCSI. The computer almost always doesn't care about any other details of the drive.

No, not all parallel SCSI standards are compatible. While SE and LVD devices are generally compatible (with performance degradation and sometimes requiring special termination), HVD devices are not compatible with either of the former. Installing a HVD device on a SE or LVD bus can blow up the SCSI controller, anything else on the bus, the drive itself or all of the above.

Fortunately, HVD SCSI was only around for a span for a few years and is comparatively rare to come across today, so the chances of stumbling upon a HVD drive is pretty low.