I have a couple of SCSI drives that I would like to use in a Blue & White G3 with an ATTO PCIExpress SCSI card. However they are LVD drives.
Is there any reason that I couldn't use them in my Mac?
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You can, though, if the card doesn't know how to utilize LVD, the drives will operate in standard mode. I operated a bunch of LVD drives off the SCSI in a Beige G3 for a while. The drives you have to be careful of are the High voltage differential drives, those can be dangerous to your hardware.
Yeah like macintoshme said you should have no problem. Sometimes you might run into a controller has problems recognizing LVD devices. In that case you need to set the jumper on the drive to force SE mode. I put a U160 drive in a old Quadra 700 and it worked fine.
I found the SE/LVD jumper on the drive and set it. As soon as I shut the Mac down I'll give it a try.
EDIT:
It detects the drive, saw the contents of the drive (was in an IBM server).
I'm trying to partition/format the drive, but so far it's stuck on the Creating Partition Map step of the Partition section of Disk Utility.
Come to think of it, I haven't partitioned/formatted a drive on this yet - the current 9.1GB drive was from a 9600/300 and I just left the partitions as they were.
Any suggestions?
I'd start with an erase using the "write zeros" option first, and then go to partitioning. It shouldn't take long to write zeros over a 9.1 GB drive.
Also, whatever happened to low level formatting and surface scan with OS X Disk Utility? After writing zeros on my SCSI drives in OS X I usually use Techtool to do a surface scan before I go to partitioning. Prepping a used SCSI drive properly can save you a lot of hassle down the road.
Also, good SCSI cables can make a great difference--the teflon variety most preferable--and I suspect that ATTO card doesn't manage termination, so you'd probably do best with a cable that has a terminator at the end.
I don't know if you're using a rev.1 or 2 B&W case, but the rev.2 case came with one harddrive bracket that allows you to stack two harddrives. I put my fast harddrive on the top part of that bracket so I can mount a harddrive fan underneath it--a little tender loving for that hard-working puppy.
I forced quit the Disk Utility program, waited a while and started it again. I selected the 'new' SCSI drive and told it to partition/format as HFS+ with no journaling. After prompting me for my user name and password it worked. I then reformatted with journaling and it worked.
Unfortunately, mine is a Revision 1 - part of the reason I've been trying SCSI drives on it.
The last SCSI drive on the cable is set to terminate.
There's a 8.4GB IDE in the rear position, and 9.1GB SCSI drives in the middle and front positions. I have another 9.1GB LVD drive that I can use to replace the 8.4GB IDE, but I need to locate some of the microscopic jumpers to set it to SE. I attempted to use that drive in a Beige G3 before realizing the difference between SE and LVD, so I don't know if it is operational or not.