On Aug 24, 2005, at 10:36 AM, James Fraser wrote:
I've been offered a couple of external drives. The kicker is that
they're
SCSI-2 (possibly -3) drives. I assume that in order to get these to
work in
my largely stock 9600 box I'd have to sink additional money into a new
SCSI
card rather than running it off of the original built-in DB25 port. If
anyone has experience running SCSI-2/3 gear off of their 9600, please
tell
me the steps you went through to do so and (very important) the costs
involved. I'm afraid my knowledge of anything beyond the original
SCSI is
nil because I had planned on simply jumping into IDE drives from here.
SCSI-2 is actually a full standard(SCSI-1 hasn't really been used since
the Mac II-days and was abandoned long ago). The DB25 SCSI ports inside
and outside on the 9600 function under the SCSI-2 standard. There are
different speeds, like the second internal bus that's twice as fast as
the external one, but electronically they should all be compatible.
If it is SCSI-2, the drives may have either a Centronics 50-pin port
(that huge one on external SCSI cases) or a port matching the one on
the 9600. In either case, you just need a cable that will work between
the drive's connector and the 9600. I'm guessing you probably have
access to the appropriate cable in either case, from the sound of what
you wrote. If not, these cables are quite common, you can usually get
the appropriate one from a computer store or thrift store for $5 or so.
The other possibility is the drives may have a high-density SCSI port
on it(they are usually thin-looking ports). If this is the case, there
are two choices. Get a cable that can connect between the drive and the
9600's port; however, while I'm sure this type of cable exists, it is
probably not very common and difficult to find. The somewhat more
expensive choice is getting a SCSI card and a high-density to
high-density cable (many computer stores will have these) that can plug
into it. The details of how you go about this will depend on exactly
which port it has (there are a couple different high-density ones) and
what type of drive it is. That's about all I can really apply to your
situation without more details.
While we're on the subject of money pits, I'm also having problems
mounting
Jaz carts. I just uncrated about 6 carts that I had (eventually)
planned to
use to archive my drive before decomissioning it. Of course, of the
six, I
can only get *one* cart to mount. Getting the machine to recognize the
drive itself is not a problem, just the carts. Is there some painfully
obvious step I'm overlooking to get the other 5 to mount properly? I
have
always treated Zips/Jaz carts as large floppies, I'm afraid.
I remember reading a thread on Zip drives here (long ago) in which a
poster
said that there were problems moving Zip disks from the original drive
to
another. It seems that the second drive would not read the disks. The
poster went on to state that, somehow, it never occurred to Iomega
that an
end user would ever want to move Zip disks between drives. Assuming
that
their assertion is correct, is the same problem inherent in Jaz
carts/drives?
The other possibility is that the carts are non-viable.
Unfortunately, all
of them were shipped to me in the post. I was always led to
understand that
Jaz carts were terribly fragile because they were, basically, the guts
of a
HD put into the a plastic cartridge. I thought that they might at
least
survive a trip through the post in their plastic albums (and additional
packing material, of course), but I may have been wrong on that. This
seems
to be my time for being wrong on a lot of things. [sigh]
I don't have any experience with Jaz drives or cartridges in
particular, so I can't tell you how fragile they are or aren't. The
difficulties you refer to with transferring disks between drives most
likely has to do with the alignment of the drive. The read/write head
(and sometimes other components) have a particular alignment; this is
often measured in tiny fractions of a millimeter, so it doesn't take
much deviation to mess things up. If the alignment on two different
drives is even a tiny bit different (whether due to use/abuse, or just
came that way) one drive will have difficulty reading data from the
other drive, if it can read it at all. This unfortunately is an issue
in *all* removable drives, from floppy drives to Jaz drives to CD and
DVD drives.
Most removable-media drives have a standard alignment that they ship
from the factory with, and if necessary can be recalibrated if it
deviates. Good quality drives/technology will not usually display this
problem in normal use (CD and DVD drives, for example, rarely seem to
have issues with alignment unless you drop the or something). However
if a company does not properly calibrate drives or uses unreliable
technology there can be extensive problems. Iomega, for all their
usually wonderful ideas, always seems to have a few issues with their
drives, while the media is often quite good. The old Bernoulli drives
are an good example; nice durable cartridges, but from everything I've
heard, the drives to read the cartridges have lousy track records for
reliability.
Back to your Jaz disks. If the only issue is alignment, you should be
able to get them working by reformatting, though they may not work in
other Jaz drives...you'd have to test that, if it's a concern. If the
disks are actually damaged, then there isn't much to be done about it
unfortunately.
- Alan
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