Good use for old Jazz drive

#1 Sat, 14 Feb 2009 - 00:24 68kMLA

This may be obvious to everyone, (But I did not think of it right away so maybe not.)

I you have an old SCSI jazz drive or SyQuest drive around that you have no need for break it open and check out the connectors. Inside, I found normal 50 pin scsi and HS power ports (Well why not?)

Cutting the case down I now have a handy (but ugly) external mount for old mac scsi drives. A great way to upgrade those little darlings that cannot hold more than one drive at a time, or to perform backups.

JHV

#2 Sat, 14 Feb 2009 - 02:48 68kMLA

Hey good call. Have you investigated any USB Zip/Jazz drives?

#3 Sat, 14 Feb 2009 - 02:57 68kMLA

I believe the same holds true for the Ditto drive (Anyone else remember those? My dad got one when he worked at AT&T.) though I haven't been able to find information on it as of recent.

#4 Sat, 14 Feb 2009 - 04:27 68kMLA

Yes I used an old full size syquest box and put an Apple CD rom drive in it,the small ones will hold a scsi hard drive. I used an old HP usb external burner box and changed the CDRW to one a Mac will reconize.

#5 Sat, 14 Feb 2009 - 04:43 68kMLA

Hey good call. Have you investigated any USB Zip/Jazz drives?

That may be a good idea...

#6 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 - 02:41 68kMLA

Back when external Firewire drives/cases still cost a fortune, you could buy the bare FW-IDE bridge board itself for a lot less. My "Zytech" external 2x SCSI CD-ROM drive was thereby upgraded to a Firewire 16x DVD-ROM.

#7 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 - 11:35 68kMLA

The USB (and SCSI, for that matter) Zip drives seem to be completely different beasts compared to both their internal counterparts, and their Jazz/Ditto siblings. The main board on those things simply has the external interface connector(s) and the internal mechanism connectors (i.e., custom ribbon cables for the R/W heads, spindle motor, etc); there are no 50-pin SCSI/40-pin IDE connectors in there.

#8 Sat, 7 Mar 2009 - 14:58 68kMLA

I tried the iomega FireWire-SCSI bridge cable (iomega jaz jet) with a recent SCSI harddsik drive, and never got the computer notice the drive at all. No success using Tiger, Leopard or Win XP on different machines, with or without extra installed driver software. The dealer swapped the bridge cable with another old new stock part and I have got the same result. Might the original iomega drive case use some special wiring which makes the cable incompatible to other cases?