68kMLA Classic Interface

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1.6"H HDD In a LC III
Posted by: Olympiaman1010 on 2010-08-20 12:16:11
Well the hard drive came yesterday, the one I ordered off ebay. It was a 4.3gb Segate Hawk. I don't know if the guy knew it was a 1.6" height drive or just didn't care. The drive is in great condition either way and decided instead of sending it back, I'd see if I could make it work. The LCIII needed slight modification to get everything to fit. I fiddled with the lid making a seal about half an inch since the front won't sit all the way down. The two latches in the back snap but like I said the front is slightly raised. I'll post a picture sometime soon. Either way it works, and it is fast! I don't know if the extra .6"H gives it more speed or not but it seems that way. Also the drive that was in there before, the 80mb quantum kept giving me false starts due to an aging step motor.

Posted by: LCGuy on 2010-08-20 13:47:49
A lot of older drives are full-height drives rather than half-height (like the original drive in your LCIII, and most modern drives), since back then they often needed more platters to make such a big drive.

Posted by: Olympiaman1010 on 2010-08-21 23:38:19
Will this put any added stress on the power supply, probably huh? At least during the start up of the drive? And does it make it any faster or is the SCSI bus only able to read a certain speed?

Posted by: trag on 2010-08-23 10:13:25
A lot of older drives are full-height drives rather than half-height (like the original drive in your LCIII, and most modern drives), since back then they often needed more platters to make such a big drive.
[nitpick]Full height is 3.3". What the OP has is a half-height drive. The LC family originally shipped with 1/3 height (1.1") drives.[/nitpick]

Full height is two CD-ROM drives stacked. For fun, one can find the old Seagate ST410800 drive. They were selling at quite a discount about eight - ten years ago. They were one of the very first 9 GB drives and they are a full height, 3.3", 5.25" drive. And they sound like a dishwasher...

Probably any newer hard drive would seem much faster than the original 80 MB drive. While they all have about the same electronic interface speed (5MB/S or 10MB/s SCSI) the speed of the heads, platter and the data density improved dramatically between when the 80 MB drive was king and when drives reached multi-GB capacities.

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