hue@coney.island.COM (Pond Scum) (06/11/91)
Here at Island Graphics we have four Sony SMO-S501 SCSI Erasable Optical drives, gotten from various resellers. Three of the drives work fine. The fourth (and oldest) has been very flaky. Normally, when you insert a media cartridge, the drive will spin it up and look at the media, flashing the LED in front while it's doing so. When it is finished you can send it SCSI commands. The flaky drive will spin up, but most of the time it never makes the sounds like the other drives when they access the media, and the LED in front doesn't flash. You also can't give it any SCSI commands, as they fail with a BUSY condition. I opened the enclosure to look at the controller. The SCSI controller is separate, as the drive is actually ESDI. When you load media into a working drive, three LEDs on the SCSI controller go on and then go off when the media is loaded. On the flaky drive the three LEDs go on and just stay on, as if the processor on the SCSI controller board is hung in some way. The weird thing is, if I insert 1024 byte sector 3M media the flaky drive will load it, but 90% of the time it refuses to load Sony disk cartridges. There is a socketed PROM on the controller that says "CCP-2.07 24/07/89". Two of the other drives that work fine report their revision level as 2.07 also. The third working drive is revision 3.02. Anyone else have problems like this? Is there any place that can refurbish this drive? -Jonathan hue@island.COM