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CMS External Drive???

U

USSEnterprise

Experienced Member
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Jan 3, 2006
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252
Location
Jackson, New Jersey
I got it from a freecycler. Its a 5.25" drive with a single D-25 on the back. No power in. Also has a two-position jumper on the back. Marked as Model

EF-360/U
CMS Enhancements Inc
Made in USA

What the hell is this for?
 
Back in the day CMS made upgradeware for IBM PC and PS/2 machines. I have a CMS upgrade MFM hard drive for my PS/2 model 30.

I suspect yours is probably just a simple external drive for a PC or Ps/2
 
Maybe it is not intended for PCs? At least the Amiga parallel port has a +5V DC, 10 mA line. Not sure if that would be enough to drive a 5.25" (floppy? hard disk?) though.
 
Hi,
Yes, I am resurrecting an old thread. Sorry but my question is directly related to the CMS Enhancements EF-360/U external floppy drive.

Has anyone located the drivers and/or manual for the drive? Can anyone confirm it is a parallel port interfaced drive? I believe a pure parallel port interface is possible as I have an Imation SuperDrive (120MB 3.5" floppy drive) which does that exact thing. However, whether the EF360U is a parallel port drive or some other interface is unknown.

I contacted CMS Products (the OEM) and after some going back and forth with their support desk, they acknowledge making the product many years ago but after many acquisitions, etc they no longer have any information on it. I find that rather disturbing but realize it is certainly possible for corporations to lose their histories wholesale after products are "end of lifed".

Any help in tracking down some info on the CMS Enhancements EF360U would be greatly appreciated!

THANKS in advance!

Andrew Lynch
 
Hello, don't know if this is even relevant info, but I dragged this up off the bottom of the net when I was looking to see if anyone was using a parallel port interface for their floppies and how they were doing it.
It looks like Toshiba used a shared parallel & floppy port in some of their early laptops, There's a bit of a text file attached below with those pinouts partly decoded on it.
 

Attachments

  • 25D floppy pinouts.txt
    8.6 KB · Views: 3
A little late, but another system that used parallel port floppies, was the HP OmniBook 3xxx and 5xxx series laptops.

BIOS support, though. Someone would have to write a driver.
It was actually able to boot off of it, as I recall.


Tony
 
In the past I've had computers that had a db25 connector marked "floppy disk' and it was proprietary. It was a seperate controller that just happened to use that connector. These were early XT machines I had. Sorry, but I can't remember what exactly they were. Library throw-aways. I *do* remember the connector puzzling me a lot, finally figured it out.

Nathan
 
Here's a snippet from a 2002 letter from IBM telling everyone what they were NOT going to support anymore...

1503 C01 CMS ENHANCES, INC. EF-360/U DISK DRV, EXT, 5.25 in,
360K, PS2/30
1503 C02 CMS ENHANCES, INC. EF-12/36 DISK DRV, EXT, 5.25 in,
360K, 1.2M, PS2
 
And, yes indeed! Only ONE single female DB25 connector, no separate power of any kind. So which pins had the +5 and +12v? hehe Plus drives really suck the power to get the motor turning. Not sure what kind of power requirement the stepper motor takes.
 
Yeah, but even though it may have BEEN a DB25, that doesn;t mean it was a parallel port, so it very well MA have had the proper voltages on it for an external floppy.

I guess, question is, of the external drive has a board inside, could someone discern if it was meant to interface to a parallel port by looking at the chips on the board?
Mebbe even be able to see what pins they go to on the DB25 onthe back of that external floppy chassis?

T
 
I wasn't saying that it was a parallel port. Pretty clear it would NOT be, with a few power sources going by. Just saying it was clearly a DB25 connector.
 
Yes, I have an external dual drive unit, a Digital RX-180-AB, SA400s inside and an Astec 38W power supply, that has dual DB-25 connectors on the case (in and out for daisy-chaining). It even has a very nice red lighted on/off switch mounted in the case-top.

I believe it was a popular hook-up to the Xerox 820
 
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