Hello !
The company I work for have decided to can their old SCII interface and start using IDE instead. First question. Which is easier to interface ? Does anyone know a good place where I can find some info about this ? What Chips where used back in the old Machintosh days (68030) in the IDE interfaces ?
Help is greatly appreciated
/Otto Blomqvist
I don't know. I suppose I could pry my old Mac apart and check. I have been under the impression that old Macs were generally SCSII based. There may be some IDE disk controller cards available for the older Macs, but I've never run across one.
The ease of developing for a 'custom' 68030 system would depend on how easily the software drivers can be developed and added to it.
If you are looking for better price and availability, you might also want to consider using serial ATA disks. This seems to be the wave of the future in the commodity PC market.
The old Macs were exclusively SCSI based. They did not have PCI slots, but instead had a propriatary card slot called NuBus. There were IDE cards (PCI) made for more recent Macs, in the PowerPC era, but there were no IDE cards made for NuBus. A 68030-era Macintosh is not worth upgrading anyhow. The controller card, if there were any, would be worth way more than the computer.
So the easy answer is, there is no possible way you can use an IDE drive with a Mac that old.
The first Mac to use an IDE drive was the 630 series (LC, Performa, Quadra), released in July, 1994. These machines used Motorola's 68040 CPU.
A quick check revealed an absence of IDE interfaces for 68030 (or earlier) Macs. That's not surprising, given the limited expandability in some of the older Macs, the lack of extra bays in their cases and limitations on IDE cable length at the time.
But all is not lost. You might be able to use a SCSI - IDE converter. Here's one:
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