AppleFile

[CelGen]

Finally completed mounting everything inside. Unit looks good, sounds good and now for burn-in.

Already I'm running into troubles.

Cabling wise my 50 pin do D-sub 25 adapter is good with no breaks. It was wired from this daigram:

However even with a terminator fitted between the internal cable and the drive no system can detect it.

I pulled the harness out of a Sun 411 enclosure and tried that to ensure it was the cable. Sure enough even without a terminator I had computers detecting it. :?:

Second problem is a bit more fatal. The drive either needs a LLF pretty badly or the HDA has failed. So the moment you poke at it it starts to constantly reseek with the odd moment it actually reads or writes.

Edited: I managed to format the drive. Windows was being cranky so I pulled out the Mainstreet and tried it instead. It formatted and mounted after selecting the low-level format option. After I do another format with HD SC setup (Unlike Drive Setup, HD SC setup will fail a drive at even the slightest hint of a problem) I'll throw Snooper's looped disk testing at it and see what happens in a few hours.

Okay, so back to problem #1 again. The cable.

electricially it's intact but something isn't getting across. Any trimmed ground lines seen are still getting grounded at the drive. There's at least four ground lines that are linked directly from the host system to the drive. Pin 1 is shield ground for the connector. The only difference between the cable I made that does not work and the Sun cable is that does work is that the Sun cable has all the lines cut up and fed through a toroidal ring and indead of a D-sub 25 connector it has an HD50 connector. The internal cabling is also about three inches shorter.

If I remove my cable from the bulkhead and try to rest it in a manner that it's far from the AC line and the power supply I don't have any change.

 

[CelGen]

The drive still makes the suspicious sound like it's repeating seeks and through Drive Setup at least it will fail to partition and format for the ProDOS file system (We'll see it the Apple II utility fairs better) but otherwise the drive is performing flawlessly. I'll leave it at that.

As for the cabling I pulled out another SCSI enclosure that had a factory made variant to the cable I made. That one works so tomorrow I'll reverse engineer that one and see what changed.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

VERY project results, comrade.

How's the marker/grime removal going? If the spray paint is acrylic/latex, try a water wet cloth with a little bit of turpentine, that's how I used to remove Stabillo grease pencil layout line residue off a ll kinds of paint in the shop. Sometimes Pledge or the like works wonders for removing grime.

A little nose grease wiped with a clean rag rarely hurts and ofttimes helps as well. ;D

 

[CelGen]

Here's my "It's 2:30 AM and I want to go to f*#% to sleep so I hope after four goofed repins THIS one better f@ing work" replacement SCSI cable.

Turns out I was pinning it completely wrong and for got to account that the way the ribbon cable crimps interleaves pins in a 1, 14, 2, 15, 3, 16 etc fashion.

Amazingly it did work so now the unit is...

COMPLETE

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the AppleFile. The worlds first SCSI hard disk, exclusively for the Apple IIe line of personal computers.

 

[LCGuy]

That is awesome

 

[resx]

Looks awesome! Hard to judge with the lighting in the pic but the paint match looks to be spot on compared to the monitor. The LED diffuser looks sharp as well, very professional looking. Nicely done.

 

[mcdermd]

I hope your smile is as big as mine. That looks really, really cool!

 

[gobabushka]

DUDE!!! It made Hackaday front page!!!!!!

 

[onlyonemac]

Does the LED always stay on or does it just come on when the disk's being accessed? If the former, I think it would be better if it was the latter.

 

[CelGen]

The drive has a header for an external activity LED so yes it only comes on when the drive is busy.

 

[MinerAl]

Very cool!