I've been using this J700 since 1996, with no problems, except the occasional HD replacement.
I've been looking online for replacement HD to back this one up, and have not been successful. It's a 4.5GB SCSI 50pin drive, as you all prolly know. What do we do for new ones these days?
Cal, you have a number of choices.
Simplest: Any 50 pin SCSI drive will work as an addition to or replacement for your original.
Pitfalls:
1) It can be difficult to find 50 pin SCSI drives, and some dealers will sell SCA (80 pin) or 68 pin drives with an adapter as 50 pin drives. This wouldn't be a problem, but the adapters create SCSI termination issues depending on where on the SCSI cable you install such an adapted drive. So sometimes they work and sometimes they don't.
2) There are (or were, haven't been shopping in a while) many older model drives available as "new" which may have larger capacities than your stock drive but will probably be slower in performance. I believe the sellers that they were never used, but a drive that was released in1996 or 1997 is going to be very slow.
3) The built-in SCSI on the J700 has a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 10 MB/s (megabytes per second). Back when it was built there were few drives that would actually deliver data faster than that. Now days, drives which can deliver 30 MB/s or even 40 MB/s are available. A faster drive will work on the built-in SCSI, but it will be limited to 10 MB/s or less.
Most economical: Buy a PCI card which provides an EIDE or ATA interface for your Mac. EIDE and ATA have a subtle difference in meaning, but in practice they're used interchangably and may just be shortened to IDE. Then buy any IDE hard drive. PCI IDE cards are under $100 and the drives can be well under $100 depending on what specials are available and such. The drive capacities for a reasonably modern drive start at 20 GB or 40 GB and go up hugely from there. You get a lot of high performance storage for your money.
An IDE interface may also let you use affordable IDE CDROM, CDRW and DVD drives. Those are a bit iffy depending on model and driver software and so require a bit of research before purchasing.
pitfalls: There may be compatibility or configuration issues with the PCI card, but in most cases it just works. For example, the VST UltraTek/66 card has good compatibility with IDE CDROM, CDRW and DVD drives, but cannot be used in your left two PCi slots without some issues.
Best Performance/most expensive: Get the latest U160 or U320 SCSI card, and an array of 15K RPM SCSI drives and link them together using RAID software like SoftRAID. In practice this doesn't work so well on machines as old as the J700, as the bus bandwidth just doesn't let such arrangements shine the way they do on newer machines. This is probably a waste of money on our old machines.
Jeff Walther
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