Great documentation of the SGI 1.44 Teac SCSI Floppy Drive. I have never heard of Teac making remote eject floppy drives. Perhaps those Floptical drives had motorized eject.
The SGI DAT drive can deal with audio DAT tapes. Most SCSI SGI peripherals were fully featured. Expensive, but worth it. One place where I worked, the flopticals were in most Indy machines and they went unused, but for the occasional file transfer.
You should test it for compatibility with other systems. Like on a Mac, a PC running Linux and a PC running Windows to see if the floppy drive via SCSI still works. There's other obscure SCSI devices, including printers and Ethernet adapters that might be interesting to see as well.
It would be interesting to see if this SCSI drive works on other OSes, like Windows, Linux, Mac OS (both classic and OSX) etc. I remember the Windows NT/2000/XP installer verbosely loading a bunch of drivers at the beginning of the install process and I _think_ some of them were for floppy drives outside of the standard PC floppy bus.
I'm not surprised these are rare devices, it's hard to imagine the use case for these that would justify the expense. Amazing to see how full featured it was within Irix, though it would have been nice if they had included some sort of utility to account for the different line endings in plaintext files. Also that case repair turned out really good! I can't wait to see the upcoming videos!
I didn‘t open it up, but according to SGI literature it definitely is a TEAC 235, also the vendor label on the drive says 235-01. Would need to open it to see if its the JS or HS.
SCSI floppy drives must have been rather expensive to build because you'd need to add the case an a custom control board to connect looks like a commodity PC 3.5" drive. Then again SGI machines were humongously expensive so maybe it wasn't an issue.
I never looked into IRIX, so I have no idea if could boot off a floppy disk or not. Older Linux releases still fit the kernel on a floppy disk and boot well of it. Technically, the SCSI flopy drive is a block device like all other removable and fixed drives as well, so it should likely work for Linux. One would need to investigate, if the floppy must be fat formatted for Likux to boot on SGI, (as in, can the PROM read it?) or if the kernel needs to be written out in raw format. Same would go for the IRIX kernel. Nice idea for an experiment! Love it!
❤👍 SGI!
Great documentation of the SGI 1.44 Teac SCSI Floppy Drive. I have never heard of Teac making remote eject floppy drives. Perhaps those Floptical drives had motorized eject.
Such a cool find!
The SGI DAT drive can deal with audio DAT tapes. Most SCSI SGI peripherals were fully featured. Expensive, but worth it. One place where I worked, the flopticals were in most Indy machines and they went unused, but for the occasional file transfer.
You should test it for compatibility with other systems. Like on a Mac, a PC running Linux and a PC running Windows to see if the floppy drive via SCSI still works. There's other obscure SCSI devices, including printers and Ethernet adapters that might be interesting to see as well.
It would be interesting to see if this SCSI drive works on other OSes, like Windows, Linux, Mac OS (both classic and OSX) etc.
I remember the Windows NT/2000/XP installer verbosely loading a bunch of drivers at the beginning of the install process and I _think_ some of them were for floppy drives outside of the standard PC floppy bus.
@@kFY514 great idea!
I see what I can do about it.
I think, since it’s a SCSI block device, it will just work without too much fuzz.
I'm not surprised these are rare devices, it's hard to imagine the use case for these that would justify the expense. Amazing to see how full featured it was within Irix, though it would have been nice if they had included some sort of utility to account for the different line endings in plaintext files.
Also that case repair turned out really good! I can't wait to see the upcoming videos!
Thanks for the video! Do you know which drive is inside? Some of most widely used SCSI FDDs were TEAC 235[J|H]S, so I wonder 🤔
I didn‘t open it up, but according to SGI literature it definitely is a TEAC 235, also the vendor label on the drive says 235-01.
Would need to open it to see if its the JS or HS.
SCSI floppy drives must have been rather expensive to build because you'd need to add the case an a custom control board to connect looks like a commodity PC 3.5" drive. Then again SGI machines were humongously expensive so maybe it wasn't an issue.
There IS no obscurity on that, iomega floptical was a floppy Drive that uses the SCSI interface.
You never know about the need having a scsi floppy drive. Can you boot from it ?
I never looked into IRIX, so I have no idea if could boot off a floppy disk or not.
Older Linux releases still fit the kernel on a floppy disk and boot well of it.
Technically, the SCSI flopy drive is a block device like all other removable and fixed drives as well, so it should likely work for Linux.
One would need to investigate, if the floppy must be fat formatted for Likux to boot on SGI, (as in, can the PROM read it?) or if the kernel needs to be written out in raw format.
Same would go for the IRIX kernel.
Nice idea for an experiment!
Love it!
But can it run Crysis? 😉
I guess ... not ;)