Legacy Hardware

[c_hernandez32]

I have a 2GB External SCSI Jaz drive, and I wanted to know if it is good drive to capture to? I can't afford a larger harddrive, yet, and wanted to know if I could capture on the fly to it? Also can you enable DMA on this drive? I have it connected to a Jaz SCSI Card that was blended with Iomega's Buz card. The Buz portion is useless, but the SCSI card serves its purpose. I would really want to use the Buz capture, even though I have a faster, better AIW 8500DV capture card, but there are no drivers for WIN XP. Are creating drivers really that hard to create?

When it comes to actual speeds, what is faster ZIP 250 SCSI or USB? Has anyone had experience, both good and bad with Ditto Drives?

[housepig]

I have some old hardware like that, and if it was a SCSI hard drive I'd say sure, capture to it.

I don't know what the i/o data rate differences are between a hard drive and a Jaz or Zip - it's possible it would work (and there's certainly no harm in trying).

what are you using as capture software? I know that one of my capture cards came with a utility that would test my drives to make sure they could keep up with the capture data rate - if you have an app like that, point it at the Jaz drive and see what it says.

[Faustus]

I've dumped all my really old stuff at this point, and it was worth it. Things run much more smoothly now. Also I stop having to worry about things like "Will Siig make a XP driver for this SCSI card or not?"

[housepig]

I've dumped all my really old stuff at this point, and it was worth it. Things run much more smoothly now. Also I stop having to worry about things like "Will Siig make a XP driver for this SCSI card or not?"

true... although most of my SCSI stuff is hooked up to a sampler, and not a computer!

but I still have a few machines around the house running Win98, and probably will for a while, simply because a) for what they need to do, it gets the job done, and b) they aren't beefy enough to run WinXP effectively.

[indolikaa]

I once had four Jaz drives chained on a SCSI controller just so my computer would look cool. The sound of 12 platters humming along, processing WAV files and exchanging data amongst themselves...

And you couldn't help but love that stylish green Jaz chassis!

The Jaz drive in question is an UltraSCSI interface, and theoretically capable of 20MB/sec. However, it's actually more like 7.35MB/sec. Compare that to the ATA/100 interface, and if Iomega really was talking MB and not Mb, then I think you'd be disappointed in its performance.

[ofbarea]

In my main PC I have a Seagate 20GB 10K Ultra 2 SCSI driver connected to an Adaptec AHA-2940U2 oem card. I was able to find firmware version 3.10 (dated 2001) and actually works really good.

This disk was a top model a few years ago, but now it’s showing its age and my current IDE 120GB Seagate is faster.

The other PC has an Adaptec 2940UW (also with 3.10 firmware) and an older 20 GB Fujitsu HD, that used to be installed in a SparcStation 20.

Finally I have a very old IBM AT PC with an ISA DPT Smart Cache III controller (SCSI) with 4 MB of ECC cache and its RAID module. It's still functional. A long time ago it used to be a 286 dedicated Novell Netware server, but these days it’s running Free Dos. Believe or not, this PC is too fast to play the Digger.

I also have an external 8mm SCSI tape drive, that I have not used for a long time, an external Toshiba 40x External CD (plugged to the 286 PC) and an ARTEC AT3 SCSI I scanner, this is still functional in XP and I think I will get a firewire to SCSI adapter to continue using it for OCR.