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| Insane SCSI to FW prices |
Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-10 13:46:56
I am sure a few at every school had a SCSI card and HD for use as a server to the other stock systems. I don't think Apple had an Appleshare server that was hosted on a IIgs, at least one that supported netboot; so far as I know that required a Mac server. So it's not necessarily a given that *any* IIgs at a given school would have a SCSI card.
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Posted by: Cory5412 on 2018-10-10 14:39:30
Correct. SCSI would have been for if you wanted to use peripherals directly on a IIgs. As far as I know, there was never any server software for IIgs, that was always done on Macs or with other purpose-built hardware.
There’s a *lot* of them on eBay from China (If I remember correctly) so it kinda looked as if they were still being made, but maybe not. I just searched on eBay and got thirteen hits.
The only brand name I don't recognize from around 1999-2004 is Ratoc. I looked at their web site and they appear not to be building a SCSI to Firewire or USB adapter at the moment, so I imagine what happened is Ratoc picked up the slack on these adapters a few years after OrangeMicro (belkin) and Iomega gave up on those adapters, and then stopped probably just a few years later.
My guess is either the same 13 items are just sitting there and the demand isn't actually that great, or this market is a lot like the market for DEC/Compaq/HP Alpha-based workstations and servers (especially anything that can run VMS): Not great, but extremely urgent and not particular cost-sensitive when it comes up (which means that machines around equivalent to your every-day G4 go for between one and three thousand dollars.)
One of the adapters mentioned a particular scanner. If that's a crazy high end drum scanner or something of the like, some shops are going to find more economy or utility in buying a $400 adapter to use with a modern (or even "modern") computer than bothering to mess with 20+ year-old computers and the attendant hassle of getting (legal) software and then, further, file transfer.
Relative to our position (here on the forum) where we already have most or all of the needed bits and processes down.
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Posted by: Trash80toHP_Mini on 2018-10-10 16:08:22
I was originally going to get a IIGS SCSI card until I saw every single one on eBay was 300 dollars... Would that be for storage or peripherals? I peeked out on the web and found what seems to be a freeware IDE interface developed and well (as far as I can tell) documented for others to play with by a guy wh seems to have done it for the heck of it.
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-10 19:46:20
Would that be for storage or peripherals? I peeked out on the web and found what seems to be a freeware IDE interface developed and well (as far as I can tell) documented for others to play with by a guy wh seems to have done it for the heck of it. Storage, I hardly even have any SCSI peripherals sadly.
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Posted by: Unknown_K on 2018-10-10 20:16:02
Sooo many different SCSI removable media and recordables out there along with scanners and other odd things.
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Posted by: PB145B on 2018-10-11 05:53:28
I just searched on eBay and got thirteen hits.
Ah, okay. I was thinking there was more than that for some reason (maybe there was last I checked).
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-11 12:01:16
Sooo many different SCSI removable media and recordables out there along with scanners and other odd things. Yeah, I would like to get some kind of SCSI MO/removable hard disk thing like a SyQuest drive someday but for now the only SCSI thing I really NEED is a CD drive.
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Posted by: Unknown_K on 2018-10-11 15:45:30
SCSI is needed for OS installs on machines that don't have a drive built in. I keep SCSI, PCMCIA, USB, and Firewire external Optical drives around for that reason. Also accumulated a bunch of SCSI external burners for back when I burned disks on vintage systems.
Kind of funny how these cheap easy to find tools are getting hard to find and expensive lately.
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-11 17:25:42
Well, I'll take any external SCSI optical drive, as long as I can trick my SGI Indy and my Macs into recognizing it.
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Posted by: Unknown_K on 2018-10-11 17:32:01
External SCSI CDRW drives used to be common and bootable with old macs but the supply dried up years ago I think. If you really need one bad PM me.
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-11 17:46:29
I don't need one right now (my current projects are mostly PCs) but in the future if I can't find one I'll hit you up.
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-11 17:57:49
as long as I can trick my SGI Indy SGI Indys are the long pole here. Macs will usually accept just about anything in the way of a SCSI CD-ROM drive but older SGI machines (and older SUN boxes as well) require CD-ROM drives that identify themselves as supporting 512 byte block size at power-on instead of the normal 2048. I tried once booting my Indy from a CD-ROM drive taken from a Power Mac 7200 and got nowhere; eventually I worked around the problem by borrowing the drive from my Sparcstation 5. (Which is a weird animal, being 1/3rd standard 5 1/4" bay height instead of half.)
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-11 17:59:33
Oh darn, I didn't know they were weird.
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-11 18:02:38
Doesn't seem like that long ago my recommendation if you needed a CD-ROM drive for one of those things would be to just buy a Sparcstation (not an Ultra, other than possibly an Ultra 1/2) and borrow the internal drive, but, gee, it looks like the prices of those have gone up like everything else.
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-11 18:04:07
My only piece of Sun hardware A. doesn't work and B. doesn't even have a CD drive.
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-11 18:10:04
The Sparcstation 4 and 5 used to be dirt common and cheap on the used market (because neither has an upgradable CPU complex like the more desirable 10/20) and had internal CD-ROM drives. So far as it goes Sun-labeled external SCSI CD-ROM drives styled to match the "lunchbox" systems like the IPC/IPX used to be dirt common. I kind of wish I'd saved one, actually...
(EDIT: OMG, you would not even believe what people want for them on eBay now. Not posting a link because it's positively pornographic.)
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-11 18:17:16
I got my IPC very cheaply (it was literally like 20 bucks) so I'm going to assume the CD drive styled to match it sells for about 10 times that.
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Posted by: Gorgonops on 2018-10-11 18:59:59
That about gets you into the very cheapest seats at the ballpark.
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Posted by: Unknown_K on 2018-10-11 19:26:37
Wanting things to match gets expensive.
I kick myself for not stocking up on Plextor SCSI drives when they were getting blown out. Luckily I had stashed a bunch of Mac SCSI CDROM drives and a few auto inject superdrives around for my last few machines but you can never hoard enough.
A few years back I snagged a NEC Multispin 3Xp external drive, they were so cool when new. Also have an oddball Toshiba XM-4101BME with is a 1" tall 50 pin SCSI drive where the whole face slides out (think my MicroVax has one like it installed and ). The oddball drives just stick out so I snag them when I see them cheap.
I don't know where you are going to find those internal 1" SUN scsi cdrom drives these days except in another SUN.
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Posted by: EvieSigma on 2018-10-11 20:27:02
Oh, I have a Toshiba drive like that in my Indigo2! I had no idea they were rare.
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