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Resolved Can I put an old IDE drive into a PowerMacintosh 8600?

tevion5

tevion5

macrumors 68000
Original poster
I've ordered an 8600 with everything but the HDD. I keep reading that it uses internal SCSI but every picture I see of the internals looks like plain old IDE to me. SCSI looks nothing like IDE usually. What's the story?
 
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havokalien said:
You are thinking ultra wide scsi looking different. This scsi looks like IDE but it is not.
Click to expand...

Damn so I can't use any of my 90's PC hard drives? That is gonna drive the cost of my investment now...

I don't suppose adapters exist, and if so do they cause any limitations?
Also does 8600 use 50 or 68 pin SCSI internally?
 
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There's two 50 pin SCSI connectors inside, the 8600 has two SCSI busses. The internal HD and CD are one one, and the other is unused internally except for a cable placed for expansion, and accessible from the backplane to connect external devices as well.

No IDE unless you can find a PCI Mac compatible IDE card. I used to modify the Promise PCI ATA-100 dual bus cards for Windows, by adding firmware and a crystal.
 
There were SCSI to IDE adapters available, but they were pretty expensive, and still are. They worked pretty well. I think they were limited in drive capacity to 32GB.

IIRC it was an IDSC-21 - searching for IDSC might return a few.

Apple even used a 2.5" version for laptop replacement hard drives (the adapter bolted to the bottom of the drive and provided a 12mm 2.5" SCSI replacement. It's a PowerMonster RX.

I believe the chipset was designed by I-O DATA in 1998

There is still a vendor selling a SCSI to SATA adapter (Stratos Aztec Monster II), but again, they are pricey:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/300994386399
 
The plot thickens! The 8600 arrived today and it turns out the owner wasn't aware that it had a 4GB SCSI drive inside it and a fully working version of system 9.1!

Not a bad find for €25 🙂
 
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