Power Mac G3 B&W SCSI drive

Question

Power Mac G3 B&W SCSI drive

Hi. I have a Power Mac G3 Blue and White 400mhz, which I believe was a server addition because of the SCSI card that came in the computer. This is a revision 1 machine, which has the IDE controller chip problems. To avoid all of that, I want to get a SCSI drive for the machine because the old 9GB drive that came in the machine recently died (finally). My question is: what type of SCSI drive should I get? I am only familiar with ATA and SATA drives and I don't know anything about compatibility with SCSI drives and this old machine. Thanks in advance!

-Aaron

iBook G4 12" 1.07Ghz, eMac 1.0Ghz, Power Mac G4 Dual 500Mhz Gigabit Ethernet, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Nov 18, 2009 7:32 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 19, 2009 5:44 AM in response to booksonshelves

What SCSI card is installed?

SCSI cabling and interfaces were in a state of flux when the Blue & White G3 was king. There are Wide and Narrow cards and drives. There are Single-Ended and LVD \[balanced or push-pull Bus drivers] (LVD drives can transfer much faster, but require a discrete Terminator, not just a strap-setting on the drive). Some LVD Fast/Wide drives are "hot swap" drives with a somewhat different connector, but adapter boards are readily available.

To make matters more difficult, there have been two major consolidations in the drive manufacturing industry -- one from the changes caused by of Magneto-Resistive heads, and the current one from "perpendicular" magnetic regions, aided and abbetted by the onslaught of sATA drives -- the cheaper drives with much more expensive add-on controllers. So reference data on specific drives can be hard to find.

SCSI drives are often the best available, but new large drives can be expensive. The drives last so long that a drive cast off by a high-end user as "too small" may be had for cheap money and still give half a decade or more of good use in a desktop or small server environment. I use SCSI drives in all my home Macs and home Server.

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Answer 2

Nov 19, 2009 8:12 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I don't really know anything about the SCSI card. I just know it was the default PCI card installed from the factory. It has three or four different spots on the the cable for separate hard drives, it's a long cable. The hard drive that died in it was an Ultra2 SCSI drive. Are there any limitations for the type of SCSI hard drive I should buy? Should I stick with older drives?

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Answer 3

Nov 19, 2009 2:50 PM in response to booksonshelves

Ultra2 is another name for LVD, the very fast transfer speed drives. The Apple-issued card would be the equivalent of either the Adaptec 2940U2B or the ATTO Tech UL2d or UL3D with one connector de-populated.

Your long cable cable should be pale yellow and folded like origami so that the three 68-pin connectors could access the three drive positions at the bottom of the cabinet. Your factory drive will likely be in the last drive connector, and the cable should also have a discrete terminator, often taped to the top of the last drive.

If you do have a discrete Terminator at the end of the cable, your drive options are wide open to any of today's (or yesterday's) top performing long-lived 68-pin SCSI drives. "Hot Swap" drives can also be installed, but an adapter (sometimes called a "paddle-board") would be required from SCA-80 (Single Connector Attachment for power and data) to 68-pin connector plus standard 4-pin Molex power.

Drives to avoid are Half-Height (1.5 inches tall) and Full-Height (3 inches tall) these drives are old, slow, and run quite hot. They are dinosaurs.

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Answer 4

Jeff

Level 6

12,328 points

Nov 20, 2009 10:16 AM in response to booksonshelves

I'd suggest dropping the search for a large capacity Ultra-SCSI drive and install a Mac-compatible ATA-133 PCI controller card, like the (now-discontinued) Sonnet Tempo ATA-133. Because the card supports 48-bit LBA, it would enable you to take advantage of the mega-sized (and quiet-running) Parallel ATA/IDE/EIDE hard drives available today. This would eliminate the need to find a secondhand/high-mileage/out-of-warranty SCSI drive, which would undoubtedly be a much smaller capacity drive for the same $$ spent. I've got the Sonnet Tempo card installed in my (Rev. 1) 400 MHz B&W G3 and have never regretted its $100 price tag.

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Answer 5

Nov 20, 2009 3:52 PM in response to Jeff

If you need a lot of space, Jeff is quite right that SCSI drives can get expensive. If your needs are more modest, the cost of an additional IDE controller eats into the cost savings from a cheaper IDE drive.

In looking around for more Vendors of drives and SCSI gear, I happened upon the interesting site referenced below. The author (a PC user) makes the case for using BOTH a high-performance SCSI drive for your boot drive, and a high-capacity, low-cost IDE drive for storage of larger files at lower cost.

http://scsi.radified.com/

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Answer 6

Nov 23, 2009 3:02 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks for the help, it's much appreciated. I've decided to go with an older scsi drive because I don't need that much space and the old g3 B&W isn't really worth spending the money on for a pci ata card. Do you have any suggestions on where to buy a scsi drive?

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Answer 7

Nov 23, 2009 4:29 PM in response to booksonshelves

Used ones are listed on eBay every week. But you should avoid any sold "as-is" or without at least a Not Dead-on-Arrival warranty. You will also find 68-pin drives, 80-pin drives, SAS drives, and FC (Fiber Channel) drives all mashed up in the same listings.

For mostly new and some reconditioned (read re-checked and found to be good) you could try this site. I have not bought from them, but they have been around for a while:

http://www.scsi4me.com/scsi-hdd-hard-disk-disc-drive.html

Any drive you buy should be able to successfully pass a bad blocks check (the drive can substitute spares for any bad blocks found) so that it starts it life with you with 100 percent good blocks.

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