Starmax Info
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Storage
IDE
The Starmax came with two internal IDE busses.
With the MacOS, each bus supports one IDE device.
(With BeOS, each bus
can support two IDE devices, one master and one slave each,
at least since DR9 April 1997. Presumably the same is true
for most if not all PPC Linux distributions.) In the general use
of the terms, IDE, ATA, and ATAPI are pretty much equivalent.
Tecnically one refers to the connector while the other refers
to the protocol, and ATAPI is a subset of ATA which applies to
removable drives.
I believe the Starmax ATA controller's fastest mode is UDMA/16.
For a long time I was under the impression the Starmax had
ATA/33 (burst speed up to 33MB/sec), but I have been told
that no Mac before the beige G3 supported ATA/33.
Nevertheless, the Starmax ATA controller should run any
ATA/66 or faster drive since these are supposed to be backward
compatible with ATA/33 and UDMA/16.
I personally have a WesternDigital 12G ATA/66, a WesternDigital
20G ATA/66, and a Maxtor 15G ATA/100 working in various Starmax
machines. You may need to use the original Starmax IDE cable
to force the drives to operate at UDMA/16, at least off the
first IDE bus. Allegedly, if you use the ATA/66 cable that
comes in retail packages with some Maxtor drives on bus 0 of
a Starmax, the Starmax may not be able to recognize the drive
and may not boot. Because of the power-on sequence on the
Tanzania logic board, the Starmax expects a working hard
drive on IDE bus 0. As a result, if you want to boot from a
SCSI or ATA drive attached to a PCI card, you may still need
an IDE drive attached to IDE bus 0.
Most drives sold in stores are ATA/66 or even ATA/100 now.
Will an older controller limit
their performance? Not as much as one might think. Check out
this August 1999 StorageReview article for some
interesting information regarding ATA/66 drives and ATA/33
controllers.
My take on this article is that hard drives always operate
slower than the limit of the drive controller. When drives
began pushing the limit of ATA/33, the ATA/66 standard and
ATA/66 controllers were released. When the fastest drives
approached the limit of ATA/66, the ATA/100 standard and
controllers were released.
So, a fast modern drive can still do wonders an an older
ATA/33 or UDMA/16 controller!
Large IDE drives are remarkably cheap, and will probably
perform as well as most any SCSI drive on the slow built-in
Starmax SCSI. Even with a fast PCI SCSI card and a new
fast SCSI drive, the performance gain is not enough to
justify the extra cost for many users. Western Digial and
Maxtor drives work fine, though there are reports
of problems with IBM IDE drives in a Starmax. CompUSA-brand
drives are Maxtors.
In any event, do not use FWB Hard Disk Toolkit.
The Apple formatter works with nearly every IDE drive
and doesn't have the compatability issues that FWB HDT did.
The second ATA connector (labelled ATAPI on the board) can
drive an ATAPI CDRW, zip drive, or a second hard drive.
Many Starmax machines came with an ATAPI CD-Rom which was
connected here.
SCSI
The Starmax came with a standard 5mbs SCSI. Motorola did
not originally intend it to drive internal SCSI devices,
and so you may not have an internal cable with SCSI connectors.
After a while, Motorola gave out free "SCSI upgrades" to
almost anyone who complained, which consisted of a long
SCSI cable with plenty of connectors. As many Starmax
owners dumped the ATAPI CD-Rom in favor of some other IDE
device, this SCSI cable was invaluable.
In most of the clones (like the Starmax), the SCSI CD-ROMs
do not have Apple Roms and so do not work nicely with the
Apple CD-ROM driver. That's why the Starmax (and most clones)
were bundled with FWB CD-ROM Toolkit. Alas,
FWB CDT seems to need an update with every new OS, and in
most cases it's not a free update. So what do you do if you
want to run OS 8 or later, without FWB? There are a few
solutions to this problem:
Note that Connectix VGS checks for the Apple drivers, and
passes with any of these four options unlike with FWB CDT.
Personally, I've chosen the OS 7.6 option because I couldn't
get the ResEdit modifications to work with my Teac 16x SCSI.
If the Teac drive quits working I'll put in a used 8x or
faster Apple CD-ROM drive, such as a 12x drive pulled from
a Mac 7300.
SCSI can support up to 7 devices, with IDs from 0 to 6.
There are three regular internal bays to work with
(two 5.25 and one 3.5 not used by the CD and floppy).
If that is not enough, some people have mounted hard
drives under the power supply. If the cables on the
power supply are short this may be impossible to do.
I used to have an OrangeMicro 930U ultra-scsi card for
a while when I had more than 7 SCSI devices. I wasn't too
impressed with the speed, however, and sold the card as soon
as I dropped below 7 devices. There are some nice ATA/66
PCI cards on the Mac market now for around $100 (the A-Card
for instance) which I've considered.
Floppy Drive
There is one very useful addition that will free up one of
the 3.5" bays if needed. In the Mac II days, there were
adapters that provided an external floppy port. They
plugged into the internal floppy controller. Although
somewhat rare, they are inexpensive and do work with the
starmax. The external floppy port can extend out the
PCI-like slots nearest the motherboard (what else can
you do with them?), and then an old external 1.4M floppy
drive can be used. [Even there - you can take an old
800k external floppy and put a 1.4M mechanism from an
old Mac II inside. It works with the slim-line 800k
enclosures, at least!] Of course, you could just dump
the floppy altogether.
And, for those who remember the days of the old 20mb
serial hard drives that connected to the floppy port, I
tried connecting one to the Starmax using the Mac II
adapter just mentioned, and it wouldn't recognize the
serial drive. So you might as well continue using that
20mb drive as a doorstop. It won't work!
Last Updated 01/11/01
