While not being overly familiar with the 9500, you should be able to add an IDE drive, along with the PCI IDE/ATA controller.
Something like this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm...tem=ACDAEC6260Mor this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Item.cfm...tem=SIISCMP4A12And you do need a Mac-compatible PCI card - any old card won't do.
There are big SCSI drives (which is what you have already) available, but they tend to be somewhat expensive. Of course, once you add in the cost of having to buy the PCI card, they may not appear all that expensive.
For instance, lowest price for a 73GB Maxtor (10,000RPM) SCSI drive on Pricewatch.com is $173. A Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM IDE drive is about $79. Furthermore, larger SCSI drives are enormously expensive - 146GB drives are around $700!!! You can get IDE/ATA drives for $1/GB or less these days.
There's a bunch of useful info here:
http://xlr8yourmac.com/IDE.htmlFurther caveat - I've never found eBay a good source of reliable, cheap hard drives. For some unknown reason, people seem to have a very fuzzy notion of a hard drive's retail/on sale price and I regularly see prices bid up OVER regular or sale prices. Also, eBay is littered with people selling dodgy drives - some are upfront about it (and with drives with 3 year warranties, some people bid these up too, figuring they can get them replaced by the manufacturer under warranty), but I don't recommend it for the best source of a quality drive. Also, be aware that the drive manufacturers have recently all shortened their drive warranties to ONE year, with a few exceptions. One of the exceptions is the Western Digital Special Edition drive (80GB, 120GB and maybe a larger model...) - which carries a 3 year warranty. It's fast (has an 8MB cache) and quiet. I have a 120GB model and am very happy with it. The best source of info on specials is
http://www.dealmac.com . You can also look for bargains at
http://www.pricewatch.com .
When it comes to ATA/IDE drives, they all work with Macs, as long as you have an ATA PCI controller. They may come with software for PC's, but Drive Setup or Disk Utility does a good job of initializing and partitioning. One of the dangers of buying a used HD, is that if it has been formatted with a third party utility of some sort, the Mac may not recognize it unless you also have that utility. I've never had a problem with a Mac refusing to recognize a drive formatted for a PC (it wants to initialize it of course), but I've heard horror stories about people trying to get drives recognized when they've been formatted with third party Mac utilities. So, save yourself some headaches, and buy a new one!
[ 04-02-2003, 06:41 PM: Message edited by: Paddy ]
