Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!ucbvax!TIS.COM!lee
From: lee@TIS.COM (Theodore Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: protecting hard drives
Message-ID: <8902121946.AA06399@TIS.COM>
Date: 12 Feb 89 19:46:35 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 19

Two questions came to mind while I was noting the flood of new
hard drive products now available --

a) is there any way of turning off any of the internal drives that are
now on the market? (I can't think physically of any clean way of doing
it since unlike the IBM boxes the apple case has no openings to the
inside from the outside.)

b) you'd think it would be pretty straight-forward to build a little
interface gadget between a SCSI drive and the cable that would allow
you to electrically disable write commands to a particular device
(I have never looked at the SCSI protocol so maybe it isn't that easy,
but it should be possible.)  Anyone know if anyone has such a thing?

(I agree with others who have commented on the absence of any
write-enable switch on hard drives, although somehow I vaguely
remember in some distant past reading about some kind of storage
media where you could lock out writes to particular regions of
the device; it may have been a mainframe disk or drum, however.)