[bighead]

I am considering buying an IBM DeskStar 36GB SCSI hard disk and would like to know how effective it would be running in a PowerMac 9500 on the internal SCSI bus. I believe in order to run OS X 10.2 as I am now on a 36GB drive, the OS X partition will have to be within the first 8 GB of the disk. I will probably take the 2 GB drive out of the 9500 and put it in my 8100 that currently has a 1 GB and a 700 MB disk. Should this swap system present any problems?

[Britney F.]

Originally posted by bighead:
I am considering buying an IBM DeskStar 36GB SCSI hard disk and would like to know how effective it would be running in a PowerMac 9500 on the internal SCSI bus. I believe in order to run OS X 10.2 as I am now on a 36GB drive, the OS X partition will have to be within the first 8 GB of the disk. I will probably take the 2 GB drive out of the 9500 and put it in my 8100 that currently has a 1 GB and a 700 MB disk. Should this swap system present any problems?

The DeskStar will work great on the internal SCSI bus but be aware that the drive will most likely on get around 9MB/s of throughput. The drive is capable of more but is limited by the internal SCSI bus (10MB/s). To remove this problem you would have to buy a faster PCI SCSI card.

There is no need to partition the drive for X since it is a SCSI drive. The first 8GB requirement only applies to Macs with built in ATA interfaces prior to the B&W G3 due to a bug in the firmware. The 9500 does not have a built in ATA bus and even if you added an ATA PCI card you still might not run into the problem since many ATA cards are identified as SCSI devices in X.

There shouldn't be any issue with moving the 2GB to the 8500 but personally I would keep the drive in the 9500 and put 9.1 on it. This will give you a way to always boot the system without having to resort to a CD in case X won't boot.

Britney

[drjoe]

Originally posted by Britney F.:

... ...
There shouldn't be any issue with moving the 2GB to the 8500 but personally I would keep the drive in the 9500 and put 9.1 on it. This will give you a way to always boot the system without having to resort to a CD in case X won't boot.

Britney

Good idea,. I also have an 8500 with an original 2 GB scsi drive that I use as a 9.1/classic drive with an IBM 18 GB scsi drive completely dedicated to OSX. Am using it as a web/mail/file server. I was unsure about the 8 gig/first partition requirement so tried it with the entire 18 gB dedicated to OSX and was good to go. With ca. 768 meg of ram and a 500 G3 processor it's is a dynamite way to use an older machine. I wonder how many circa 1995 PC's are successfully running XP :-)

drjoe