What kind of hard drive goes in my Beige G3?

Mac, that is. Apple Macintosh. The drive has been trouble for years, and I don’t actually use this machine any more, but I am now thinking I’d like to make it into a Linux box, and I’d like to put in a new hard drive.

Problem: at the time I bought it, I though SCSI was the way, and Apple offered the option of a 4 GB ultra wide SCSI drive (SCSI-3?), so that’s what I have. The standards have passed it by, and now I have no idea what will work in my computer.

Here are the specs from the Apple site:

* Automatic termination
* Advanced Data Streaming Technology (ADS)
* RAID-ready
* Embedded RISC I/P processor
* Ultra SCSI connector: Fine pitch 68-pin "P"
* Flash ROM BIOS
* PCI 2.1 compliant
* Large command FIFO
* Supports disconnect/reconnect
* Asynchronous I/O support
* Multiple initiator support
* SCSI-3 tagged command queuing
* SCSI Manager 4.3 compatible

So I guess my question is is half GQ and half IMHO: What kind of currently available hard drive will work? Or do I really need a new SCSI card? Or is it better to switch to IDE?

(Note: I’ve already installed a SCSI internal Zip drive (long ago) and it came with a DVD-ROM (ATA?)).

Sounds like you have a second rev of the Beige G3 (300-366 MHz). Although I think even with the SCSI option you could put an IDE/ATA drive in there, it’s still going to be on the really slow bus Apple used.

It may be better (especially if you go with a larger drive) to get a PCI IDE card. A generally good resource is Low-end Mac (link takes you to the specs and information for your computer).

Yes, it’s a G3/300 minitower, and yeah, I hadn’t realized that I could get that performance boost from the card. However, I don’t really need a huge drive, and there are some cheap SCSI drives out there in the 9G range. Problem is, that everything is listed as “80-pin SCSI Ultra 160” – is this utterly incompatible with my interface, or is something as simple as an adapter possible?