🚀 go-pugleaf

e4315555@student.uq.edu.au (Peter Naylor) writes:
>>Does anyone know if SCSI drives sold for IBM-PCs are compatible with
>>the MAc - specifically internal LC-II slot?
>>They seem to be a fair bit cheaper  - why?  SCSI is SCSI isn't it?
>Yes, SCSI is SCSI, generally.
>I guess the answer about the Mac dealers' prices is that they can 
>generally get away with it because a lot of Mac owners think they are 
>sufficiently different that they need special "Macintosh hard-drives".  

Perhaps things are radically different in Australia; here in the US, I've
usually found that PC vendors sell SCSI drives for more than Mac vendors
do.  (I'll admit that I haven't looked very hard in the PC vendor world,
sticking mostly to the vendors that look like they'll be in business next
year rather than in prison...  this does, however, cut me off from most of
the PC vendor world :-)  In fact, I've occasionally seen Mac vendors sell
SCSI drives for _less_ than PC vendors sell the equivalent IDE drives  --
though this usually happens only at the end of a drive's manufacturing life,
where it's possible that the SCSI marketing channel runs low on drives before
the IDE marketing channel.  (It may also be that the Mac market is more
dominated by business buyers than the PC market, and thus the vendors expect
the average market-savviness of the buyers to be higher.)

However, Mac drive vendors usually have two associated costs that the PC
drive vendors do not have (which _really_ has to make you wonder about US
PC vendors!):  Mac drives are usually (not always) sold with mounting
brackets, and they are _always_ sold with formatting/driver software.
PC drives don't need formatting software, since they rely on the adapter's
built-in driver.