16 May
2013
16 May
'13
12:13 a.m.
On 15/05/13 11:45 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 05/15/2013 11:40 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
That was the main good thing about the move away from SCSI, they also moved
away from this nonsense. The other good thing was cheaper drives.
But was it ever really a limitation? I had a LOT of SCSI-based Macs go
through my hands 10-15 years ago, and I put arbitrary SCSI drives in them all
the time. I had probably the same formatting utility that Ethan had. Worked
great.
Ethan is right about some versions of the Apple formatter looking for
Apple firmware, but there were excellent 3rd party formatters, and the
Apple formatter could even be patched (pretty sure I've done it).
There was no real obstacle to using generic drives that I'm aware of.
--Toby
My first Mac was Mac Plus ... since then I am not
aware of any Mac that
couldn't use generic SCSI drives. I don't know what the Apple firmware did
(bug fixes?), but nothing was locked to it.
Sure there was... back in the Mac II days, the Apple formatter checked
for Apple drives in the copyright string (via IDENT packet, AFAIK).
The drivers were not Apple-drive specific, so there were 3rd-party
formatters that would get that industry-standard drive working with
your Mac.
I have multiple Seagate ST1480N drives. Most were out of Suns, but
one has an Apple sticker on the outside and says (in part) "(c) Apple"
when you query it.
-Dave