16 Sep
2006
16 Sep
'06
4:31 a.m.
"Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at verizon.net> wrote:
Don't ignore what he wrote with respect to debugging: simplify everything
until you've only got the host adapter and the drive. Ideally
with only a piece of ribbon cable between the two. You will probably
discover that with a short cable that it doesn't matter whether termination
is installed or not! (Although your Adaptec host adapter will probably
complain at boot time if termination is not correct.)
This brings up what is probably a more on-topic issue: I've never had
a CD burner (SCSI, IDE, whatever) last more than a year or two. Even if
only lightly used. Inevitably I just toss it and buy a faster one for
less $ than the first one cost.
Once or twice I opened it up and removed dust-bunnies but this never
helped.
Is there something I should be doing to preserve "classic" computer
CD readers/burners?
I will admit that I have vengefully destroyed some very classic CD
readers (e.g. RRD50) purely out of spite for how dreadfully poor
performing they were. (A RRD50 is very optimistically "0.5X"). I
did the same with lots of RD5x MFM drives in the late 80's/early 90's,
oh how I despised RQDX/MFM hardware compared to the Emulex/Dilog/
CMD/etc. clones!
Tim.
There aren't terminators on the back of the
external case, just a switch,
which connects to a pair of pins on the back of the drive -- those pins
either need a jumper or they don't, I'm just not sure which.
Almost always, "jumper on" means "termination on".
I don't recall if there's a parity jumper
there or not but the drive itself is
marked, they just don't express the sense of the pins.
Parity jumpers on SCSI CD-ROM's are a crapshoot with respect to sense
of installed/uninstalled.
If it is the
only drive on the cable none of the SCSI ID jumpers need to be
connected and it will show up as SCSI ID 0.
That's the part I was wondering about...