Syquest SyJet 1.5 drive not working

[ttyr2]

Dug out another old "gem" from storage recently. I bought this Syquest SyJet 1.5 SCSI external drive back in 1998 I believe and it worked fine then. It hasn't been touched in all of that time. Plugged it in to the beige G3 with a 50 pin HD to 25 pin SCSI cable, no termination because it's internally terminated if the only device on the SCSI chain. The Syquest utility sees it and it'll spin up the one cartridge I have, but after about 5 seconds it ejects it.

I don't have any other carts to try. Do any of you guys have any troubleshooting experience with this particular unit?

 

[CuriosTiger]

Dug out another old "gem" from storage recently. I bought this Syquest SyJet 1.5 SCSI external drive back in 1998 I believe and it worked fine then. It hasn't been touched in all of that time. Plugged it in to the beige G3 with a 50 pin HD to 25 pin SCSI cable, no termination because it's internally terminated if the only device on the SCSI chain. The Syquest utility sees it and it'll spin up the one cartridge I have, but after about 5 seconds it ejects it.

I don't have any other carts to try. Do any of you guys have any troubleshooting experience with this particular unit?

I don't, but one thing I noticed with my SyQuest 88MB drive (different mechanism than yours, but still) was that apparently, the PSU has trouble supplying enough wattage on the 12V rail to spin up cartridges.

I thought my drive was faulty, so I bought a SyQuest 5200C 200MB drive on eBay. The new drive works flawlessly off the internal PSU in a PC, but not off the PSU in the external SCSI enclosure. Seems the problem may have been my PSU, not the drive mechanism.

I'm tempted to buy a modern PSU with +5V and +12V outputs and put that in there. Meanwhile, what I'd suggest in your case is to see if the mechanism will work off a modern power supply.