6 Jun
2006
6 Jun
'06
9:06 p.m.
At 20:25 -0500 6/3/06, Chuck wrote:
What was the MO drive on the Next cube--650 MB? Seemed
silly to me to
market the thing without a hard drive--and I think Next eventually came
around to that way of thinking.
256 MB. I don't think the cartridges were interchangeable
with anything else common. There were reversible cartridges which
could hold 256M per side, but only one side was accessible at a time.
NeXT did add first a "Swap drive" of 20 MB and later larger hard
drives, 105MB in pizza boxes, 330 and 660 MB in cubes, and eventually
stopped selling the opticals.
There were significant problems with drive dust inhalation in
the NeXT implementation. That led to reversal of the fan (by
mechanically reversing, *not* by changing around the power connector,
in case you want to try it) by many owners, which was eventually
approved by NeXT. However, my cube has a fairly unique set-up which
meant that fan reversal caused problems with overheating of the SCSI
driver chip.
There were also long-term problems with either the drives or
the media - they seem to be going bad at a fairly regular pace. I
don't know that I've heard a good explanation for that. It *might* be
some form of connector corrosion; disassembling and cleaning mine has
cured it twice, even though it didn't look dirty at all around the
lens area.
Corrections or clarifications welcome, apologies if this is
redundant (getting behind on the digests again).
--
- Mark
Cell Phone: 210-379-4635
office: 210-522-6025