If you have a harddrive is it highly recommended that you have a working battery and real time clock for your A3000. Yes you will have some problems with external SCSI chains and you also run the very large problem of corrupted file system. I have had problems in the past with the FFS regarding date/time for the creation of files or folders.
When you have a problem with the FFS and need to run some form of disk doctor over the files you get time before creation problems. IE, the current time/date is actually before the time of the creation of your files!
Usually these need user input to get past, try clicking the mouse 30,000 times to fix your harddrive
I had a badly corroded RTC circuit and no clock! Got this fixed not longer after my marathon 30,000 clicks!
Az
