From: Mark Benson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Stupid Seller? Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2004 14:52:04 +0000
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ViewItem&item=2779557850&category=16178
He claims it's not Mac Compatible. I looked it up on Seagate's site here:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/scsi/st32550n.html
And it looks perfectly standard...
Anyone else know anything different?
The auction is over, so I guess this is moot, but...
The drive in question is a Seagate ST32550N. I have used several of these in my Macs. I had a RAID of four drives made up of two 32550Ns and two 32550Ws, i.e. two narrow and two wide drives. So they definitely work in the Mac.
Caveats:
The seller says this is a Compaq drive. I have run into a few Compaq drives which appeared to be standard hard drive models, which just wouldn't work in a Mac. I think they might have had custom firmware or a weird block size or something. So it could be something like that.
Even if this drive will work, you probably wouldn't want it. The ST32550N is one of the first Barracuda drives spinning at 7200 RPM. Ah, you say, but that's a good thing. No, because this drive is from something like 1995. It whines like a banshee. That machine with four of them in a RAID--I had to install sound absorbing material for speakers in the computer case to make the drive noise tolerable.
And they generate a tremendous amount of heat. In normal operation they become almost too hot to touch.
Finally, they're *slooooowwwww*. This is probably not a problem for your application because your Mac's SCSI is probably slower. But, despite the drive's 10 MB/s interface, it won't deliver more than 6 MB/s in the real world. The heads and platters are old slow technology.
I would keep an eye out for something like the IBM DCAS-32160. They're a little bit whiney, but nothing like the ST32550N.
Jeff Walther
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