power mac g3 scsi hard drive?

Question

power mac g3 scsi hard drive?

I was reading online that the 400mhz version of the blue and white power mac g3 shipped with a scsi 9gb hard drive. What is this? Would it be possible to take out this hard drive and put in a regular ata hard drive? Thanks.

-Aaron

iBook G4 12" 1ghz, iMac g3 600mhz, Power Mac G4 Dual 500mhz, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Mar 11, 2009 11:22 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 12, 2009 6:07 AM in response to booksonshelves

SCSI drives (and a PCI-slot SCSI card and 4-drive LVD SCSI cables) shipped as "Server" versions of G3 and G4 Tower Macs and as "build to order". These are standard units with a SCSI card and SCSI cable and drives added. Their ATA/IDE Hardware would have been intact when shipped, but over time, sometimes the ATA cables and sleds have been removed as spares for other machines.

The Rev 1 Blue & White, with its solid three-drive bottom shelf (screws from below only, no stacking bracket) has a tragic flaw that precludes use of 40 GB or larger/faster drives on its built-in ATA/IDE Bus. One solution has been to install a SCSI card and SCSI drives.

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Answer 2

Jeff

Level 6

12,328 points

Mar 12, 2009 7:29 AM in response to booksonshelves

If you remove the SCSI controller PCI card and replace it with a Mac-compatible ATA-133 controller card (like the Acard AEC-6280M), you can connect up to (4) IDE/ATA-133 hard drives. That card supports 48-bit LBA, which enables the use and full recognition of drives larger than 128 GBs. If you want to use smaller capacity drives (120 GBs or less), you could install this older Acard AEC-6260M ATA-66 controller card for less than half of the price of the 6280M card. You may find the AEC-6280M card for less than OWC's price, if you check around. Newegg sold it for almost $20 less than OWC, but they no longer stock it.

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Answer 3

Mar 12, 2009 8:48 AM in response to Jeff

Thanks for the reply. Basically i'm looking to get a g3 blue and white 400mhz that has a 9gb scsi drive, and i'm wanting to know if i'll be able to put an ata33 drive in it and if it will recognize it as a bootable drive. Thanks.

-Aaron

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Answer 4

Mar 12, 2009 9:56 AM in response to booksonshelves

The Mac will recognize and mount as many different drives on as many different Busses as you can connect. All may be present and accessible at the same time, including SCSI and IDE/ATA simultaneously. You simply use a Control Panel/Preference to specify which drive to boot from next.

There is no fundamental difference between the units sold as SCSI and those sold as IDE/ATA. The parts are interchangeable.

Message was edited by: Grant Bennet-Alder

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