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This article explains what a hard disk driver is and how to identify it by name and version number--information essential to establishing its compatibility with the Macintosh operating system.
DISCUSSION
- The manufacturer of the driver.
- The version number of the driver--often the same as the version of the disk utility that installed it.
- The SCSI ID, SCSI bus number, or ATA bus number, depending upon the drive type and where it is connected.
- Other technical information, such as whether the driver is asynchronous or has blind writes enabled.
- Hard Disk Toolkit, by FWB Software
- Silverlining, by La Cie, Ltd.
- FormatterFive, by Software Architects, Inc.
- Anubis, or APS PowerTools, by CharisMac Engineering, Inc.
- DiskWorks, and Micronet Utility, by Micronet Technology, Inc.
- Drive7, and Formation, by ProSoft Engineering, Inc.
The identity and version of a hard disk's driver can usually be obtained from the Get Info window:
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1. Select the hard disk icon on the desktop.
2. Choose Get Info from the File menu.
Figure 1 Macintosh HD Info window
The "Where:" section shows first the drive's name, then information (highlighted in the example shown) that will vary with the program used to install the driver, such as:
Distinguishing an Apple driver from a third party driver
Disk drives that have been initialized with Apple's Drive Setup will show something like the following for a SCSI drive and an IDE or ATA drive, respectively:
Where: Macintosh HD, SCSI ID 0 (v8.0.9)
Where: Macintosh HD, Internal (ATA 0, v3.1.0).
When a third party driver is installed, the content or arrangement of this information will frequently differ, and a manufacturer's name is the most common indicator. The following list identifies some of the most common driver manufacturers and the utilities they have made to install them. Thus, in the example pictured, "CharisMac" confirms that a driver created by CharisMac Engineering, Inc. is present, and Anubis version 2.5.6 is the utility that installed it.
Once the driver's name and version have been determined, compatibility with the Mac OS version in use can be confirmed with the driver manufacturer. An incompatible hard disk driver can cause software conflicts, formatting structure corruption, and data loss.
For more specifics on the driver version numbers that Drive Setup installs, please see the following article:
Article 22167: " Apple Hard Disk Driver Matrix "
About Hard Disk Drivers and Why They Are Important
Devices communicate with applications and with the operating system through special programs called device drivers. A device driver typically controls a specific hardware device.
The device driver for a hard disk controls the process of reading from and writing to the disk. It resides outside of the Macintosh volume, which is the accessible part of the physical disk represented by the hard disk icon. As such, it is not a visible resource that can be created or modified in the usual way, requiring instead the use of a specialized disk utility like Apple's Drive Setup.
When troubleshooting for the causes of software conflicts and data corruption, the influence of the hard disk driver is often overlooked. When a later version of the Mac OS is installed, a later version of the hard disk driver must often be installed as well. The system installers for Mac OS 8 and later check for the presence of an Apple hard disk driver and update it automatically, but if a third party hard disk driver is detected, such as on a third party hard drive or a drive that was formatted with a third party disk utility, the installer will only warn that the driver may need to be updated for compatibility. There is nothing wrong with having a third party hard disk driver installed, so long as it is compatible with the Mac OS.
Finally, note that though Drive setup can often, via its initialization function, install its driver onto a third party drive, the Apple driver's compatibility in that configuration is untested and unsupported. Conversely, it is acceptable to use Drive Setup in that fashion to replace the third party driver on an Apple drive.