You may find this helpful: this is a repost of an earlier post I made with regard to SCSI hard drives obtained from RAID arrays: snip I've bought some of those drives from eBay that had non-standard sector sizes in their firmware (in my case, 520 bytes instead of 512). For some reason, I couldn't change the sector size using any of the software tools I could find, and had to buy an Adaptec SCSI controller for my PC and low-level format the drives. I tried low-level formatting with one PC's Diamond FirePort 20 and another's BusLogic, but for some reason only the Adaptec could fix the sectors. Those drives were IBM DCHS-04F (Ultrastar 2XP), and they work great now, but fixing them was a royal pain. /snip snip the previous owner had made some SCSI mode page adjustments to the drive that I had to reverse. It isn't a characteristic of the drive model, just something you should be aware of when you're bidding on eBay hard disks of any type. Somewhere on Google I found that some RAID arrays use 520 byte sectors and use some of that for parity information, and some AV studios use different sector sizes to speed up disk access for AV tasks. I'm not clear on how that works exactly, but the end result is that the drives give unsupported sector size errors to Apple HD SC setup, Apple Drive Setup, and the Linux hard disk driver. /snip
On a side note, I got a Seagate ST15150N (the 50-pin narrow version of this drive)off eBay a while back, and it worked well for a few years in my old Apple 230MB external SCSI hard drive case before the case's poor ventilation overwhelmed it. I don't have that disk any more, but as I recall I had enable motor start enabled, drive terminator disabled, and I can't remember what the terminator power was set to. I didn't have to do this drive like I did my Ultrastat 2XP's, but YMMV. Hope you find this helpful. -Drew Beckett -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
