i apologize for the length, but i have so many questions before i purchase any hardware. i appreciate any advice. i would like to add more storage to my 8600. i currently run 8.6, but during this upgrade i would like to switch to 9.0.my internal ribbon goes - from mac, open, CD(id-3), zip(id-5), open, stock HD(id-0). 1.) is adding a drive simple plug & play into an open spot? 2.) does it matter what the id is(other than 3,5,0)? 3.) does the physical place on the ribbon matter? 4.) will the mac see the new drive before the stock bootdrive, interfering with startup? 5.) are drivers needed for non-apple drives if i re-initialize? 6.) do all drives accept HFS+ ? 7.) i believe the 8600 uses ultra(scsi-3). without installing a scsi card can i use wide, ultra-2 or 3 with just the pin adapter? (i understand that the speed of the faster drives won't be there) 8.) is scsi-3 lvd or hvd ? 9.) what is scsi LP? 10.) do external drives use different scsi-types? are they plug&play? one more thing, on the motherboard of the 8600, there are two scsi controllers(i think) labled, J9 (STD scsi scsi-1)and j10 (Fast scsi scsi-0). is that standard and fast? what does the label scsi-1 and scsi-0 mean? thanks again!

1-yes, pretty much...although you might, or might not, have to initialize the disk after plugging it in (usually the mac sees the drive immediately, but -rarely- it needs to be initialized first. 2- strictly speaking, no, (don't use #7..see below) but it's always a good idea to relegate #id 1 to your second drive simply because most external devices (should you ever want to plug one in) aren't set to it ..although they should be adjustable anyways. 3- it shouldn't...but as you stated, you have two scsi busses...if you can get a drive that fits on that second bus it would (i think) be a faster harddrive...frankly, i'm not really up on fast vs. regular scsi, however. 4-the mac will always look at id #0 first for boot..then it looks consecutively up ((or down, i'm not really sure) the line..but it always boots from he first bootable disk it sees *unless* you've set a different drive in the "startup disk" control panel. 5-with SCSI drives in general they need to be recognized as apple drives or drive setup won't initialize them...there used to be a patch for drive setup to let it recognize non-apple drives...but i've tried several times and the link is now dead (anyone?). There is a large exception, however, in that many non-apple quantum SCSIs seem to get recognized without a problem (likely because most apple SCSI's have been quantums).. I presently have non-apple quantum scsis in my 7200, 6500, and an external drive , and had no problem with any being accepted as apple drives... Unfortunately the only way your going to find out is to try it out on a *known to be working* connection and see if it gets recognized as an apple drive. 6- yes, any drive that can take HFS can take HFS+...it's only a way of organizing the files on the disk, after all..anything earlier than MacOS 8.1 will not be able to read it though... As I stated earlier, i'm not up on ultra scsi, so i'll skip past 7,8,&9... but as to #10..the external drive is part of the same scsi bus (likely SCSI#1) so it's subject to the same conditions as internal scsi, and it gets counted as one of the seven devices on the scsi chain (from #0 to #6 per SCSI Bus...#7 is reserved for the motherboard only...) HTH

thanks dominicus