awakened from the storage graveyard
Jan 28, 2008I 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.