macdan
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I'm aware of five IDE-to-SCSI adapters, ACARD, ADTX, Addonics, Artmix and Century. Of those, I have a pair each of the ADTX and Century adapters. ACARD's 2.5" adapter is no longer being made according to the ACARD engineer with whom I spoke at MacWorld/CreativePro NY 2003. I'd never heard of an ACARD 2.5" adapter until then, but according to the engineer with whom I spoke they did indeed make such an animal at some point. ADTX may still make their adapter, at least it is still listed on their website. This was the unit Apple sold, as a 1GB drive for use in the scsi PBs. The same drive/adapter combo was sold by aftermarket vendors (eg: MicroTech) for PowerBooks, SparcBooks, etc. Apparently IBM owns (owned?) a piece of ADTX. Here's some more ADTX adapter info. The Addonics item is for an adapter for 3.5" HDs, I don't know if they make anything for 2.5". I don't know anything else about this outfit. Artmix looks almost like some kind of Mac 'club' or co-operative, here's a product page link and more info. Century's is currently available, one of mine is in a PPC540C/166 attached to an IBM 30 gigger: The Century adapter has the correct mounting hole pattern to use later HDs in old PowerBooks. With the Apple 1GB + ADTX PB SCSI drive, you can replace the drive with any 12.5mm or thinner IDE drive. However my ADTX adapters can recognize only a max of ~8GB, where the Century adapters have a 32GB limit. Also, the ADTX adapters I have are somewhat slow, the Century is faster (ADTX = ~500K/s vs. Century = ~1.1MB/S) in a PPC PB 500. Of course, neither can make anywhere near complete use of modern HD speed as a SCSI PowerBook's scsi bus is the bottleneck. The Century adapter is not cheap at 11,000Y. The Artmix item costs less but I don't know if they will ship to the US. An ADTX adapter (most likely still attached to its original HD) can be had on eBay for $2 to $100 depending on the phase of the moon, the current Dow index level . . . etc. :-)
Upsizing an Apple OEM 1GB driveI formatted an IBM 10GB Travelstar (not Apple ROMs BTW) on an ATA-bus equipped PB, then transfered it to the ADTX adapter plate. At first glance the drive appeared to be all 10 GBs but testing revealed an unholy mess of read-write errors. Upon re-initializing the drive (using Drive Setup IIRC) it then showed up as an 8.x GB drive with the remaining portion not visible or available for use. Worked fine though, and was quite a bit faster than the old IBM 1 GB dog with which the adapter originally came. Size-wiseAFAIK, all SCSI-based PowerBooks can accept up to 17mm thick drives, so you could use most any ATA drive 12.5mm or thinner with one of these ide-scsi adapters. That describes most any modern ATA laptop drive though. As for playing MP3s on a PB500, you _must_ have a PPC processor as I know of no player for 68K Macs tho I'd love to hear otherwise. The ADTX adapter uses the early laptop drive hole layout. Most ATA drives 4GB and larger use the later-style hole layout. The adapter's metal side rails can be flipped over to allow using the later layout, however a couple of the mounting screws tend to get in the way. I've sourced thinner-headed screws, and I've also ground down thicker screws. It's kind of a bother either way, but it is possible to get it to work. |
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2004.08.09 - new page