I have an opportunity to rescue a Seagate T340823A disk drive from an
old no-name PC clone. It uses the common ATA interface. Can I use
this drive in a Mac G3 desktop machine? I understand it has both SCSI
and ATA internal interfaces and cables. I'm assuming I can format the
disk and install drivers with Drive Setup.

Please respond to this group. Thanks.

Gary Ford
Plaid Flannel Software

Gary Ford <scroff[at]expireit.com> writes:
>
> I have an opportunity to rescue a Seagate T340823A disk drive from
> an old no-name PC clone. It uses the common ATA interface. Can I
> use this drive in a Mac G3 desktop machine? I understand it has
> both SCSI and ATA internal interfaces and cables. I'm assuming I
> can format the disk and install drivers with Drive Setup.

Here are the drive specs:
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/ata/st340823a.html

It's a generic 40G ATA drive, so it should work.

The big catch is wether your computer can support slave drives or
not. IIRC, the revision-A motherboards for a beige G3 will not
support slave drives. If you want to use this drive as your only
internal drive, it should work fine.

I think Apple's Drive Setup will work with any ATA drive. (But watch
out if you add a SCSI drive - Drive Setup only works with those models
that Apple has certified, all other SCSI drives must be formatted with
third-party utilities.)

Use Drive Setup to partition and format the drives. If you want it
to be a boot volume, boot your system software CD and run the
installation program afterwards.

-- David