20 Aug
2007
20 Aug
'07
8:25 p.m.
Jerome H. Fine wrote:
Heh.... someone really knows there old Sony MO...
Funny enough... I ran one of these combos.... I aquired a drive
w/o controller... (cheap thankfully)... later on I aquired a complete
enclosure/controller/drive. Turns out the drive on the complete one
was bad... (Wow... I had a spare ! (completely accidentally of course...
never would have gotten the bare drive in the frist place if I'd
have known :-) ).
Well, needless to say, even later I aquired another enclosure that had
two of those drives in it (and interestingly two bridge controllers).
at least one part was bad in there.
Suffice to say I think I have a whole single drive unit with bridge
and a second drive bare... and I think 2 working bridge controllers
here. (now the question of precisely where here... well,
that's more complicated :-) ).
I used 2 discs to backup some stuff too.... (abt 10 yrs ago).
When I moved to the house I'm in now, one of those discs I discovered
unreadable... but the other was fine. This year I discovered the
2nd disc now unreadable.... I even tried a SCSI (I have an SMO-E501)
drive... no go.
I also have a number of discs for these.
After my experience, I don't trust them anymore. I think they are
environmentally sensitive... and I'm thinking that they probably got
too warm or something ? dunno...
If anyone is interested... make offers on parts, whole units, discs, etc...
I have no plans to use them at this point.
I did like the unit when I had it up and running....
-- Curt
Mr Ian Primus
wrote:
I was searching on eBay for ESDI stuff, and came
across an ESDI MO drive. Now, this was listed by one
...
So, did they even make this drive in ESDI?
Jerome Fine replies:
The first SCSI MO drive I ever used was from Sony.
The SMO S-501 consisted of two parts (this is from
memory and it was over 15 years ago - so it is likely
unreliable):
(a) A C-501 PCB about the size of a 5 1/4" drive which
had a 50 pin SCSI header interface for the host adapter
and a 34 pin / 20 pin (2 of these if I remember correctly)
header interface for each of the 2 supported drives. This
board was called a controller and was completely separate
from the drives
(b) A D-501 5 1/4" drive which I was told had a MODIFIED
ESDI interface and used standard 34 pin / 20 pin edge
connectors. Exactly what the word modified meant specifically
was never made clear, however, Sony made it VERY clear that
the C-501 controller PCB was required to interface the D-501
drive to a SCSI host adapter and any warranty on the D-501
drive seemed to be dependent on using the C-501 controller
as an interface.
...
Jerome Fine