Are there any concerns to moving to 10k rpm?
Make sure it has the correct connector for the bus type you're using.
If you're lucky, you'll find one with a 50-pin connector on it so you won't need
an adapter to use it on your S900's built-in bus. If you're buying an 80-pin
SCA2 drive (most of the ones you'll find on eBay fall into this category),
you'll need an SCA2->50 pin adapter to use it with the S900's built-in SCSI. If
you're looking at a non-SCA2 drive, odds are it has a 68-pin connector and
you'll need to find a 68-pin to 50-pin adapter.
Alternatively, you could purchase an additional SCSI adapter (my
favorite is the Adaptec 2940U2W, but YMMV) that supports Ultra Wide SCSI and Low
Voltage Differential SCSI. Ultra Wide (UW) and Low Voltage Differential (U2W or
LVD) both use 68-pin cables, though UW cables are cheaper than LVD/Ultra160
cables but won't work with LVD or Ultra160. LVD/Ultra160 cables are 68-pin
twisted-pair (they look like a mess), cost a pretty penny, and require a
terminator for the cable since AFAIK drive termination isn't supported for
differential operation. Whew! Ultra Wide has a maximum burst transfer speed of
40MB/sec, while LVD supports 80MB/sec. The S900 has two internal SCSI buses,
one that maxes at 5MB/sec and another that tops out at 20MB/sec. Using a faster
SCSI adapter will probably give you an extra bit of speed as well, though it
will be more challenging to set up.
Any recommendations out there?
I've got a couple of IBM Ultrastar 2XP's and I formerly had a Seagate
ST15150N and had no complaints with any of those. I posted this a while back,
but you may have trouble partitioning SCSI drives bought from eBay if the
previous owner changed the sector size in the drive geometry to something other
than 512 bytes/sector. The two IBM drives I have both arrived with 520 byte
sectors, and nothing short of low-level formatting with my Adaptec 2940U2W would
change that. I find it notable that _only_ my Adaptec was able to low-level
format the drives, since neither my PC's FirePort 20 or BusLogic were able to
fix the sector size. I used the 2940U2W in my PC to do that, not the Power
Domain 2940U2W I have in my Mac.
Are the 4 pin power connections standard?
Yes.
Can a 1.5" depth unit be used in the space where the original was found?
Depends on where the original was found. 1.5" drives won't fit in the
lower hard drive bay (the one down by the front air intake), but will fit into
the bay slung underneath the floppy drive. When in doubt, put a ruler to it!
Hope this helps!
-Drew B
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