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Question about SCSI devices

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silbah

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Feb 24, 2020
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6
Hi,

I'm thinking about maxing out the capabilities of an Amstrad 1640PC.
I've purchased a Future Domain TMC-850 SCSI card and am thinking about getting a 5 or 8 slot SCSI enclosure so that I can install various SCSI drives in it.
I'm not going to install any HDD's though.
I'm interested in installing a ZIP 100MB drive, a TEAC 3.5" 2.88MB floppy disk drive, and a TEAC 5.25" 1.2MB fdd, for starters.

I don't need boot capability from the TEAC FDD's (it would be really cool though) but I'm also not sure if I will need any drivers to use them on a PC XT which only supports 360K 5.25" or 720K 3.5" floppy drives, running DOS 5.0 from a CF card.
Do you guys have any experience with SCSI devices (that aren't HDD's) connected to a XT type PC?

In the future I would also like to try other SCSI devices, like a CD-ROM and a 1GB JAZ drive. I think that the CDROM is quite straightforward, but I have no idea about the JAZ drive. Do you know if these will work well "out of the box" or if they require hard to find drivers or "hacks" to work?

Any help or comments would be appreciated.
 
silbah said:
I'm interested in installing a ZIP 100MB drive, a TEAC 3.5" 2.88MB floppy disk drive, and a TEAC 5.25" 1.2MB fdd, for starters.
Click to expand...

Chuck would know better but I don't know if there was ever any SCSI adapaters for the Teac 5.25" drives. The 3.5" drives just had a bolt on FC-01 board for SCSI which could be used w/ 2.88 and 1.44 drives AFAIK. I have never tried a SCSI fdd so I am not sure how the system would address it (i.e. could it be set as A: or B: drive). Even if it can be set as A: or B: like you mentioned it probably will not boot and most floppy utilities will not work.

You could also consider ZIP 250 SCSI - but those are external only.
 
I've used both Jaz and Zip drives with DOS SCSI. Jaz is on the hairy edge of capacity, however. 1GB is about the limit for a 6-byte CDB. Not all SCSI driver software supports 10 byte CDBs.
 
It's an XT. Most XT have been shipped with MS-DOS 3.x and earlier. That does not support partitions bigger than 32 MB. You shoudl upgrade to DOS 5 even to support a ZIP drive.
 
I got my SCSI board yesterday. On boot up it shows that the BIOS is version 950 v7.0.
I've read a lot about how v8.2 allows booting HDD on an XT compatible whereas newer versions do not. Not sure about older versions...
But what about v7.0? Should I upgrade right now, to v8.2? Or wait to see if my (future) devices will work properly?
I'm patiently trying to get floppy disk drives (1.2MB 5.25" and 2.88MB 3.5"), a CD-ROM drive and a 100MB ZIP drive to see if they will work in a SCSI enclosure connected to this board.
Has any tried this before? Any experience that you could pass along?
 
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