mikeford@socal.rr.com (Mike) writes:
>
> I want to take one of my old 630 macs and put a HUGE IDE drive in
> it, then run Samba and netatalk under maybe netbsd, for a network
> server. Whats the biggest drive I can use with the 630?

A Q630 has a SCSI hard drive. If you want to put an IDE drive in
there, you'll need to buy a controller card. I don't know if any was
ever made for the 630.

Now, if you want to put in a huge SCSI drive, I think it will work.
Note that the internal SCSI bus is narrow (50-pin) while most modern
SCSI hard drives are wide (68-pin). I don't think there's enough room
in a 630's case for an adaptor. Which means you won't be getting a
really big drive or you'll be mounting it externally.

As for the maximum capacity, I don't know of any. I don't think Macs
have ever imposed a limit on the size of SCSI drives. Any drive you
can physically connect to the 630 should work. But with two gotchas:

1: The HFS file system doesn't support partitions bigger than 4G (and
is really inefficient with partitions bigger than 1G). So a large
drive will put a lot of icons on your desktop.

2: If you install OS 8 (8.1 is the latest that's compatible with a
630), you can format partitions with HFS+. HFS+ allows for much
larger partitions and is much more efficient. But only PowerPC
Macs can boot from an HFS+ partition - so you'll need at least one
HFS partition for booting from.

-- David

In article <7adc687e.0309241438.d8ad79e@posting.google.com>,
mikeford@socal.rr.com (Mike) wrote:

> I want to take one of my old 630 macs and put a HUGE IDE drive in it,
> then run Samba and netatalk under maybe netbsd, for a network server.
> Whats the biggest drive I can use with the 630?

The Q630 was one of Apple's earliest forays into IDE. The internal hd is
ide. The controller is said to handle only one channel. I put a 6GB in
one, I don't know the upper end but given the crippled nature of the ide
controller, I would be suspicious of high numbers. There is also a SCSI2
external chain, on which the CDROM resides at position 3. The computer
will take a 64MB memory chip available from Otherworld, perhaps
elsewhere.

In article , David C.
wrote:

> mikeford@socal.rr.com (Mike) writes:
> >
> > I want to take one of my old 630 macs and put a HUGE IDE drive in
> > it, then run Samba and netatalk under maybe netbsd, for a network
> > server. Whats the biggest drive I can use with the 630?
>
> A Q630 has a SCSI hard drive. If you want to put an IDE drive in
> there, you'll need to buy a controller card. I don't know if any was
> ever made for the 630.

the hard drive was ide and the cdrom was scsi.

>>> I want to take one of my old 630 macs and put a HUGE IDE drive in
>>> it, then run Samba and netatalk under maybe netbsd, for a network
>>> server. Whats the biggest drive I can use with the 630?
>>
>> A Q630 has a SCSI hard drive. If you want to put an IDE drive in
>> there, you'll need to buy a controller card. I don't know if any
>> was ever made for the 630.
>
> the hard drive was ide and the cdrom was scsi.

So it does. I just looked a bit closer. (Not having a Q630, I'm
using MacTracker and various web sources for my reference.) Although
the bus is SCSI (from which I jumped to the conclusion of a SCSI hard
drive), the hard drive has a separate IDE bus.

According to LowEndMac:
http://www.lowendmac.com/quadra/q630.shtml

The hard drive interface is PIO mode-3, which means the interface
won't be terribly fast. So don't bother paying extra for things like
high-RPM spindles or various Ultra-DMA speeds. (These drives should
work, but you won't see much of a performance boose from them.)

Assuming that the controller properly supports LBA mode, you should
be able to use a drive up to 128G (137G, the way HD manufacturers
count memory). Beyond that will require support for 48-bit LBA,
which the Q630 definitely doesn't support.

-- David

In article <240920032034365793%nospam@nospam.invalid>,
nospam wrote:

> the hard drive was ide and the cdrom was scsi.

That's correct. I'd expect the Q630 to take up to an 8G drive, but I
haven't tried a bigger one. Maybe I should, then get back to y'all.

--
You are what you eat, therefore, I'm a vegetable! Cows and chickens
and Pop Tarts are too.

Howard Shubs writes:
>
> That's correct. I'd expect the Q630 to take up to an 8G drive, but
> I haven't tried a bigger one. Maybe I should, then get back to
> y'all.

8G is the maximum size if the drive is not accessed with LBA mode
(1024 cylinders). If LBA mode is supported, then 128G is the limit.

I couldn't find anything definitive about whether the Q630 supports
LBA mode or not, but a web search turned up something possibly useful
in an unrelated discussion.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-ma...9/06/0005.html

The thread is someone trying to port NetBSD to a Q630. The relevant
part of the message is the following excerpt from the boot log:

wdc0 at obio0 (Quadra/Performa series IDE interface)
wd0 at wdc0 drive 0:
wd0: using 16-sector 16-bit pio transfers, lba mode
wd0 1033MB, 2100 cyl, 16 head, 63 sec, 512 bytes/sect x 2116800 sectors

If I read this correctly, it is saying that the drive is using LBA
mode. Presumably, the device driver wouldn't bother reporting LBA
mode if the hardware didn't support it.

-- David

shaminonospam@nospam.techienospam.comnospam.invalid (David C.) wrote in message news:...
> mikeford@socal.rr.com (Mike) writes:
> >
> > I want to take one of my old 630 macs and put a HUGE IDE drive in
> > it, then run Samba and netatalk under maybe netbsd, for a network
> > server. Whats the biggest drive I can use with the 630?
>
> A Q630 has a SCSI hard drive. If you want to put an IDE drive in

Nope, it came with a IDE drive. see


I just don't know the size limits.

In article ,
shaminonospam@nospam.techienospam.comnospam.invalid (David C.) wrote:

> If I read this correctly, it is saying that the drive is using LBA
> mode. Presumably, the device driver wouldn't bother reporting LBA
> mode if the hardware didn't support it.

What I need to do is find an IDE drive sitting around and plug it into
the Q630. There are two problems: 1) I think I sent my 20G drive away,
and 2) I'd have to set up the Q630.

--
You are what you eat, therefore, I'm a vegetable! Cows and chickens
and Pop Tarts are too.

> The Q630 was one of Apple's earliest forays into IDE. The internal hd is
> ide. The controller is said to handle only one channel. I put a 6GB in

Actually the first IDE I think, and for some reason Apple only allows
master drives, no slaves, until maybe the current generation of macs
(not sure).

In case people are curious about why I want to use a 630, one word,
POWER, it only uses about 45 watts and I think runs netbsd just fine.
Speed may be a real issue, but that isn't clear yet, and may be more
related to lack of 100bt ethernet cards for the 630. I have a pile of
the 630's, and a couple large drives, all that is holding me back from
testing is time and my low spot on the NetBSD learning curve (need to
download stuff and get ready, ie maybe this weekend.)

Thanks to all for help so far (given the lag in posting from Google
your answers will be here before my thanks).

BTW my next choice is either a 4400 or an old PC, but I haven't given
up yet on the 630.

mikeford@socal.rr.com (Mike) writes:
>>
>> The Q630 was one of Apple's earliest forays into IDE. The internal
>> hd is ide. The controller is said to handle only one channel. I put
>> a 6GB in
>
> Actually the first IDE I think, and for some reason Apple only
> allows master drives, no slaves, until maybe the current generation
> of macs (not sure).

G4 systems all support slave drives. I don't know how many of the
older machines (if any) do.

From what I've read, the 630 definitely does not. I'm pretty sure
that beige G3s don't. I think the B&W G3's are supposed to, but do
it unreliably without a firmware upgrade.

-- David

David C. wrote:
> mikeford@socal.rr.com (Mike) writes:
>>>
>>> The Q630 was one of Apple's earliest forays into IDE. The internal
>>> hd is ide. The controller is said to handle only one channel. I put
>>> a 6GB in
>>
>> Actually the first IDE I think, and for some reason Apple only
>> allows master drives, no slaves, until maybe the current generation
>> of macs (not sure).

> G4 systems all support slave drives. I don't know how many of the
> older machines (if any) do.

> From what I've read, the 630 definitely does not. I'm pretty sure
> that beige G3s don't. I think the B&W G3's are supposed to, but do
> it unreliably without a firmware upgrade.

The first revision beige G3's do no support slave drives in OS 9.2 and
earlier. They do work under OS X. Starting with the second revision
beige G3's, slave drives do work under OS 8.1 to OS X. The first
revision of the B&W G3's has problems on the fast IDE bus for the HD
supporting slave drives and sometimes larger than original drives. It
was fixed in the later revision B&W's. There are web pages describing
the change in the ATA/IDE controller chip so a later revision can be
identified.

Joe Heimann

P.S. On some of the PowerMacs before the Beige G3's, when using Linux
slave drives can be used. It works because the Linux driver accesses
the IDE bus differently than the Apple boot and run time IDE driver.

In article <7adc687e.0309251141.628600ad@posting.google.com>,
>In case people are curious about why I want to use a 630, one word,
>POWER, it only uses about 45 watts and I think runs netbsd just fine.
>Speed may be a real issue, but that isn't clear yet, and may be more
>related to lack of 100bt ethernet cards for the 630. I have a pile of

If you want a low power file server, consider a 6100. Uses almost the
same amount of power, has 60~66 Mhz PPC-601 and can take 128Mb of RAM.
With the PPC, your OS software options are larger.
I've been running one for several years in my basement as a FS.

Only disadvantage is that it's SCSI disk rather than IDE and
uses up a bit more shelf space.

--
Dave Funk University of Iowa
College of Engineering
319/335-5751 FAX: 319/384-0549 1256 Seamans Center
Sys_admin/Postmaster/cell_admin Iowa City, IA 52242-1527
#include
Better is not better, 'standard' is better. B{