awakened from the storage graveyard

I have a knack for buying into removable storage that looks like it will be great but eventually ends up in the market dustbin- syquest drives, LS-120 floppy, Iomega Jaz, etc. I’ve had them all. I was digging in this collection of also-ran storage and found a Castlewood Orb drive and the Castlewood branded usb-scsi adapter. I’ve been interested in getting to one of the disks that has my 1999-2000 mboxes and other odds and ends. These are also backed up on DAT- another storage medium that should have failed- but my DAT drive is an internal, full-height model and I don’t have a PC lying around with a bay. What can I say, I sure can pick ’em.

The usb-scsi adapter is a Shuttle Technologies eUSCSI chipset and recognized under OSX Leopard. All it took to get working was an active terminator on the drive and setting the SCSI Id to 0 (zero). That SCSI Id means no other device is going to work daisy-chained, but given the roughly 500Kb/s transfer speed I saw this is just good enough to pull my old files off and move them to another medium.

Here’s a dump from the Apple System Profiler:

   eUSCSI Bridge Ver 1.11:

     Capacity:  2.05 GB
      Removable Media:  Yes
      Detachable Drive: Yes
      BSD Name: disk2
      Version:  1.00
      Bus Power (mA):   100
      Speed:    Up to 12 Mb/sec
      Manufacturer: Shuttle Technology Inc.
      Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
      Partition Map Type:   MBR (Master Boot Record)
      Product ID:   0x0002
      Serial Number:    07
      S.M.A.R.T. status:    Not Supported
      Vendor ID:    0x04e6
      Volumes:
    MISC:
      Capacity: 1.99 GB
      Available:    1.2 GB
      Writable: Yes
      File System:  MS-DOS FAT16
      BSD Name: disk2s5
      Mount Point:  /Volumes/MISC

It even shows up properly in the Disk Utility and can be repartitioned.