[comp.sys.next] 2.88Mb external SCSI floppy drive on old cube

cyliax@ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax) (01/10/91)

Since I have an old cube, and I wanted to have a 2.88Mb floppy on my cube,
I decided to hook up a 2.88Mb SCSI floppy drive to the cube.

It's working. I now have a 2.88Mb SCSI floppy drive hooked to my old
style cube running NeXTOS 1.0. So far I have tried to format 720K and
1.44Mb floppies on it and was able to build a filesystem on the 1.44Mb
floppy. I don't have any 2.88Mb floppies to try, but expect them to
work as well. I did have to write some programs to initialize the 
drive and format the floppies.

-ingo (#2160)
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mikec@wam.umd.edu (Michael D. Callaghan) (01/11/91)

In article <1991Jan10.094802@ecn.purdue.edu> cyliax@ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax) writes:
>Since I have an old cube, and I wanted to have a 2.88Mb floppy on my cube,
>I decided to hook up a 2.88Mb SCSI floppy drive to the cube.
>

What floppy drive are you using? How much was it? Where did you get it?

MikeC

--
___________________________________________________
Michael D. Callaghan,MDC Designs, University of Merryland
mikec@wam.umd.edu

cyliax@ecn.purdue.edu (Ingo Cyliax) (01/11/91)

I guess there was more interest than I thought. Well, here are some more
details:
	- I'm using Teac's FD-235JS-401 2.88Mb SCSI floppy drive, they
	  also have a non-SCSI version, a FD-235J-653. Call Teac to see
	  who your nearest vendor/distributor is. I paid ~$200 for this
	  drive, and I have seen them as high as $230. The non-SCSI
	  version is around $150. You will also need cables and a case
	  with a power supply. For the old Cube, you'll need the SCSI 
	  version, and I don't know wether the non-SCSI version will
	  work with the upgraded cube.
	- This is a SCSI drive, NeXT's drive is not. This drive should work
	  on other systems (Suns, etc.), if you have the drivers.
	- You will need some programs to configure the SCSI controller on
	  the drive as well as a program to format the floppies. After it's
	  configured/formatted, you can label it with the "disk" utility.
	- I have not tried to use dump yet. I have used tar, but only on 
	  one volume. I have newfs'ed a floppy, mounted it and copied some
	  directories to it.
	- I have copied a PC-DOS 720Kb disk to a file on the harddisk and
	  used mtools to look and manipulate the DOS files on the image.
	- This may all change in NeXTOS 2.0, I don't know how much support
	  the OS has for SCSI floppies, it may format the floppies for you.
	  but you'll probably still need to configure the controller on 
	  the drive.

Hope this helps,

-ingo

--
/*                Ingo Cyliax    ECN, Electrical Engineering Bldg.          *
 *      cyliax@ecn.purdue.edu    Purdue University, W. Lafayette,IN 47907   *
 *          ing@cc.purdue.edu    Work: (317) 494-9523                       *
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