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200MB Syquest

techknight

techknight

68040
Well, I picked up a very clean 200MB external syquest drive with cartridge at the local hamfest for $15. I figured why not. 

I decided to hook it up to the mac and the disk appeared to have been freshly formatted by its previous owner, as it had a 1956 creation date. So it was done on a Mac as well. 

I dont have any Syquest software, or utilities. no mounting anything, All I had was SCSIProbe installed. 

But for testing sake, I went ahead and opened lido to do a Format. Well, thats when it all went to shit. format failed. became an unrecognized file system. So thats when I decided to try HD SC, it failed. Drive setup failed.. 

So from that point i decided to run norton utilties to recover the volume but it just kept hanging up with the busy light on the drive. with a single click every so often.

Ugh... oh well... Maybe the disk needs low-level formatted again, but I dont have any of the Syquest stuff. 

I decided to take the mainboard out of the drive to find some electrolytic caps. I dont see signs of leakage, but it is a 1992 drive so i am sure they arnt good!

20150516_210045_001.jpg

 
I have had bad luck with Syquest stuff, been given several, worked maybe once or twice and became unusable afterwards.... 

 
This worries me as I have 3 SyQuest drives and several cartridges which has been shelved for literally close to a couple of decades!

 
I kind of figured reliability wasnt very good on these drives, because the more dense the media, the worse spindle mis-alignment causes extreme issues. 

Since from what I can see, a Syquest drive is basically an early Jaz drive. 

But, Does anyone have any of the syquest utilities and drivers? 

 
I have dozens of the 200mb and some 88 & 44mb disks. Never had a failure. Used them a lot until bout 10 years ago. Pulled them out last year and tried all of them. They all worked. All my MO disks worked. About half my zip disks died.

Jaz drives were Iomega. I used to have those fail regularly. They were replaced under warranty but the data was still gone. Plus you had to pay the shipping to them.

 
Recapped the drive today. 

Glad to say it fixed it for the most part. 

But the disk does have a few bad sectors. 

I did notice though on these drives, when they encounter a bad sector, they take FOREVER before it determines that its bad. 

Imagine when low-level formatting how long it would take. 

 
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I picked up a lot of "unused" 200MB carts on ebay in an auction for fairly cheap. $5 plus shipping. Advertised as unused

Well.. should have known something fishy. 

The jackass hit em with a bulk tape eraser, and well, yea they are garbage. 

Edit: Actually, one of the cartridges crashed the heads. 

Oh well, was worth a shot. 

 
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After letting it cool down and firing up the original known working cartridge. 

It finally took off and started working again. These drives are definitely very very buggy. 

CC333: After sticking in the first cartridge of the ebay lot, I got Servo Error. Then every single cartridge including my good one, did the same thing. Recycling power gave me this loud screech griding noise and a motor speed error on my good cartridge, Thought the heads crashed. 

So i let the enclosure cool down, power supply and all. Fired it back up and its working again.

But again the other carts say Servo error. So they are garbage.  

I may need to pull the drive back apart and check for molten rubber, or lithium grease hardening in the head pivot points, and the spindle motor. I didnt do that. 

 
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Oh, so it's probably fixable, then? That's nice to hear.

Weird servo errors and screeching noises to seem to suggest a problem with lubrication (not surprising, given its age), so that's probably a good thing to check out before it gets damaged beyond repair. Maybe if you lubricate it properly, the servo errors will subside a bit? Maybe the cartridges themselves need lubricating??

Molten rubber could be causing a problem too. Particularly with the heads getting stuck to their rests.

Either way, it sounds like it's becoming quite a project.

c

 
Well the issues only happen when the heads release from park and begin to read the cartridge for the first time. thats when the failure occures. 

Eventually if you power cycle it 50,000 times itll pick up and access the disk properly. 

Once it gets past this point, there are no more issues. heads work fine. 

But once they park, and release to re-read the disk after a power cycle/sleep cycle or eject, boom. Failure. gotta start over again. 

 
Well, I decided to take the top off and watch how this thing operated. 

Suffice to say, I now know why these drives were so unreliable. Sometimes when you eject the disk, it does NOT bring the heads all the way back home. So when you swing the lever over, it "drags" the heads across a still-disk before locking into place to allow an eject. 

Well this will eventually destroy the heads over time. Or at least, knock them out of tolerance. 

Oh and of course, dragging across the media will destroy the media over time as well. Bad sectors. 

There ya go. 

 
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Out of all the times I've tried to get SyQuest drives to work, I've never had a single shred of success. Far too unreliable.

All my MO disks worked.
Click to expand...
MO is archival grade. The minimum expectancy for the media is 75 years and I recommend everyone grab drives and cartridges whenever they have the affordable chance.

 
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