Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!ccng!tgoldtho
From: tgoldtho@ccng.uwaterloo.ca (Thomas A. Goldthorpe)
Subject: Re: hard drive info wanted
Message-ID: <1990Sep25.234935.1501@watserv1.waterloo.edu>
Keywords:  Hard disk add on's
Sender: daemon@watserv1.waterloo.edu
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <45139@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 90 23:49:35 GMT
Lines: 31

In article <45139@apple.Apple.COM> sfisher@apple.com (Stephen Fisher) writes:
>
>Well, I took the plunge and ordered my slab today. After much debate,
>I decided to get the 105M hard disk and buy an external SCSI drive.
>Now comes the hard part: which drive and from whom? Ideally I'd like
>to get a ~330M drive, so that I can use the internal drive for
>backup, etc. I looked in MacWeek and saw some reasonble deals
>(a Wren and a Maxtor for around 1500), but are these usuable
>on the NeXT??? Are there better drives (or cheaper dealers)??
>
>Thanks in advance for any help.
>Steve

Well, I have put a few gig of third party drives onto a NeXT already.  It
works well.  No third party software is required for this operation.  All
you need to do is make the appropriate entries in some of the /private/etc
files and use a few NeXT supplied routines.  Assuming that in 2.0 they didn't
change it that much (there isn't that much to do to add any drive of the
SCSI type, provided the disk port likes it:-)), there should be no problems.
The low level format can be a problem in some cases.  Most drives are already
low-level formatted, but the buyer can't be guaranteed of the interleave or
if the disk's built in cache has been enabled.  This is where your favorite
mac is useful (see I told you a mac was good for something:-)).  Use a
program like micronet utility to do this simple job.   The rest is done
by the NeXT (thankfully).  Mail me for details.

Tom
tag@sunee.waterloo.edu