On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Louis Schulman wrote:
OK, here is a very elementary question that has
always
stumped me. Is there any difference between an external
SCSI hard drive made for a Mac and a generic SCSI hard
drive? Can I hook up a Mac SCSI hard drive to some other
computer with a SCSI interface and expect it to work (after
formatting, of course)? What about the other way around?
The first alternative works very well indeed. The second won't, though.
Macs use hard drives with a particular Apple firmware, without which HD SC
Utility won't recognise the drive. Bloody stupid. Another Apple
peculiarity would be its lack of support for remote start in
SCSI, so the hard drives will need to jumpered for automatic start on
power, but this won't affect other systems.
Non-Apple drives work quite well with Macs; however, while your
observation about the use of Apple's HD SC Utility is correct,
all non-Apple SCSI drives sold *FOR* the Mac come with their
own SCSI setup utility.
For a SCSI drive *NOT* sold _for_ a Mac, you'd need a third-party
toolkit like FWB' Hard Disk Tools (or whatever it's called). I've
used it to add IBM and DEC SCSI drives to a Mac.
regards,
-dq