On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Richard Erlacher wrote:
  When my WD20AP unit is attached to an ADAPTEC AHA1542B
under DOS and allowed to
 boot with the drive turned on, it "sees" and reports the presence of a device,
 WD-1006-something which it later reports it can't spin up. 
Interesting and confusing!  The WD-1006 series that I am familiar with
were all either ISA or MCA cards with either MFM or RLL ST-412 drive
interface.
  It looks like it belongs to the late Apple-II/early
MAC period, being shaped and
 colored to match.  (take the color info with a grain of salt, though, since I'm
 "chromatically challenged.")
 It's pretty clearly a SCSI device, else the SCSI controller (AHA1542B) would not
 be able to communicate with it via the SCSI-1<=>DB25 (Comonly used with Apple
 SCSI ports) adapter cable. 
That is hard to argue with!
                                                 - don
  I wouldn't bet on a healthy result attaching the
device to anything not SCSI.
 It's possible that my unit had a dead drive in it, at least if there's a bridge
 controller, which I'd readily believe, but if there's a bridge, it probably
 wants to be set up, i.e. told what sort of drive it's got, which has to happen
 from the outside if it can't readily read the drive info from the drive itself,
 in most cases.  Now, a couple of other Apple type external drives with which
 I've experimented have had customed firmware that prevents the bridge controller
 from behaving as similar models would behave, possibly requiring that they see
 the Apple setup routines before doing anything.  I'm not at all certain about
 that.
 Dick
 ----- Original Message -----
 From: "Eric Chomko" <chomko(a)greenbelt.com>
 To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
 Sent: Wednesday, June 13, 2001 6:01 AM
 Subject: Re: old external Apple drive
 Mike Ford wrote:
 > >> I recently was given a Western Digital Hard Disk 20AP, obviously
 > >>intended for
 > >> use with an Apple computer of some sort.  It identifies itself as a 
Western
 
 Why do you say obviously intended for use with an apple? I don't recall
 anything by WD that was for an Apple, or even Apple friendly. 20AP sounds
 more to me like some old parallel interface PC thing. 
 I have the WD 40AP. It uses a DB-25 connector and I thought that it was SCSI, 
  but
  wasn't convinced for sure. I do remember I
didn't find much on the web for it 
 one
  way or another. Does anyone know if its SCSI or
TTL parallel? Any other info?
 Eric