tape drives (IBM SSA, IBM England -> Xyratex)

The cdrom drive may have hooked up directly by SCSI to the host. The tape drives may have been on the SSA bus. IBM invented SSA to sabotage Fibre channel back in the day, promised to merge it so it would be media compatable (not protocol) compatable with FC to stop FC. As a result, how many out there have either? only recently has SATA taken root using some advances in the serial transfer chips. Anyway the tape drives may or may not be that clean an interface if they have a bridge or such to the SSA even if you find the 68 pin connectors. Most of the SSA stuff was built by a company I worked for (over 10 years ago for purposes of the forum) which was based in Portsmith, England and with a large facility in Havant England. They are still around after major implosion making FC and SAN storaage, and are called Xyratex. IBM gave a group of local (to England) senior management the disk operation there, and $100m (or # dont recall which) and a 5 years of IBM support for their hardware there and told them to split it off. As a result they had a big building wired with Token Ring and OS2 print servers trying to work with NT. It was wonderful to see such a waste of time trying to make such junk work. Anyway, were the SSA systems you had large Power systems, or AS/400? Also the same IBM division which became Xyratex made some of the 20 and larger 5 1/4" drives for the AT before before being split off. Jim Roy J. Tellason wrote: <snip> <snip>