Re: Quadra 700

[John Klos <john%ziaspace.com@localhost>]

Hi,

> > I've been using lots of Acard SCSI-IDE adapters and SCSI-SATA adapters in 
> > all of my older SCSI machines. There are no size limits until you get to 2 
> > terabytes (32 bits worth of, or four billion, 512 byte blocks). I have 
> > several m68k Macs with 250 gig hard drives and at least one with a 500 gig.
>
> John, if you can share where you get these from at a reasonable price, I'm 
> sure everyone on the list will send you b-day cards.  :)  Whenever I look for 
> them, the cost seems to be way more than the value of the Mac I want to stick 
> it in!

To tell you the truth, they're pretty expensive. The cheapest I've been 
able to get them for was $60 but only when I bought a lot at once at my 
job, and that was for the Acard 7726H and 7726Q type. The biggest problem 
with them, though, is that you need 68 pin to 50 pin adapters and 
termination, so sometimes the additional cables and/or adapters are more 
than the Acard.

If you're OK with dealing with 68 pin, we bought something like 50 of 
these and we have at least a dozen we're not using. Contact me off-list 
if you want to buy a few.

The 7720U is nice because it works well with single ended buses, but it's 
meant for CD and DVD drives, so it doesn't fit well at all with 3.5" 
drives.

In my Quadra 605, I used to use a 7720U in the area where the floppy drive 
would go:

http://boobookitty.ziaspace.com/
http://boobookitty.ziaspace.com/Pages/9.html

But sometimes, if you plan to keep a machine forever, you want something 
that's as close to the original as possible, so I bought one of these:

http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?prod_no=ARS-2000SUP&type1_title=SCSIDE%20II%20Bridge&type1_idno=11&idno_no=249

Because it's made for a 2.5" SATA drive, you can get drives up to 500 
gigs, it takes very little power, and the SCSI connector and power 
connector are a direct replacement for any 50 pin SCSI drive. I'll post 
some pictures of that in my Quadra 605 soon.


> > A partition with a hundred megs of space is more than enough for System 7 
> > and a bootloader plus a couple of emergency netbsd-INSTALL kernels.
>
> I've had Mac OS partitions as small as 10-15 MB.  A minimal 7.1 install and 
> Booter will fit.  OTOH, if you use 7.5 or higher, you better have 50-70 MB.

Since new drives are always so big these days, I usually use at least 100 
meg just in case I want to copy NetBSD sets over AppleTalk to the Mac 
partition. On the other hand, it's been years since I've done an install 
from Mac OS...

John