Apple 3.5 SCSI HD, to read on PC?

[Guest]

When going through some VERY old belongings, I found a 3.5 inch, 2GB apple SCSI hard drive. I remember it had some personal documents on which I want to get at, or at least, check to see if theres any personal documents.

My first question, is it as simple as buying a SCSI card for my PC and just plug it in and Win 7 will read it?
What do I need to be able to read this HD?

 

[fantastik250]

Does it have a SATA cord? You can be able to read it. I'm not sure if the drive is formatted for Apple though. For example you can format from windows and it will read on any PC or Apple product. But I don't know if it works the other way around.

 

[Guest]

The drive itself is a 50 pin IBM DCAS-32160
What I know about SCSI isn't worth knowing. All I want to do is read the drive on my pc but I don't want to buy the wrong thing. Any advice?

 

[Supernova1138]

I think you'll need to get a SCSI controller card, one that can connect to a narrow SCSI device in order to connect that drive to your PC. Since you aren't trying to install an OS on a SCSI drive you shouldn't have too many issues with drivers, just install the card, install the drivers and it should recognize the drive. Just make sure the SCSI controller does have drivers available for your OS, you don't see a lot of SCSI anymore, so if you have a 64 bit OS, that might be an issue as a lot of SCSI controllers probably only have 32 bit drivers available.

Even then, you might not be able to read the drive in Windows, depending on how it's formatted. You should be able to read the drive if you boot into Linux from a live CD, Ubuntu is pretty user friendly if you aren't too familiar with Linux. Make sure that your controller card does have Linux compatible drivers though. Use a 32 bit version if you can't find a controller card that has 64 bit drivers.