Found a Vulcan HD!

[btomlin@NOSPAM.texas.net (Bruce Tomlin)]

The other day I was coming back home from Dallas and made a thrift store 
stop in Temple, TX.  I found a IIgs in back and popped the lid (who 
wouldn't?)  I saw what looked like an internal hard drive mounted in a 
power supply, and the cable was 40 pins.  The controller board said 
"Vulcan" on it.

What it looks like is an IDE controller card!  The large number of TTL bus 
buffer chips on the controller board seems to confirm this.  The drive was 
40 megs, but didn't have an OS on it.  I guess that's because the GS RAM 
Plus card only had 1 meg on it.  I installed 6.0.1 and upgraded the RAM to 
2 megs and it booted right up and I connected to my Power Mac with 
Appletalk.  It also had a "Sonic Blaster" audio digitizer card in it.

Anyhow, I happily paid $80 for it, and along with it came a IIgs monitor 
(no cable, but I got a spare a few days before), an Imagewriter II 
(they're a dime a dozen these days), a 3.5 drive, a third-party 5.25 
drive, an ADB mouse, an Apple II mouse (is this the same pinout as the Mac 
Plus mouse?), the original power supply and filled Apple RAM card, and 
assorted manuals, including the ones for the Sonic Blaster and the GS RAM 
Plus.  (But no Vulcan manual.)

So now I have two IIgs's with hard drives!  I'm probably going to swap 
parts around and put the Vulcan drive in the same machine with the 
TransWarp.  I wonder how big an IDE drive I can put in the thing.

So how reliable is the HFS FST in 6.0.1?  I had heard of a fixed HFS FST 
in a 6.0.1 disk image on a web site, but there was no indication whether 
this was the standard 6.0.1 FST or a newer one rolled into it.

If I put in a drive of a couple hundred megs, I don't want two dozen 
partitions cluttering the desktop.  Just a Prodos boot and big HFS 
partition would be enough.  But I guess I wouldn't be able to take the IDE 
drive to a Mac to run Disk First Aid on it every now and then.