SyQuest Drive

[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Hi all,

Does anyone have any experience with SyQuest drive cartridges (the 5.25" size)? I see that there are some drives available for purchase online, but has anyone been able to successfully get them to operate on a modern computer and if so, can you provide any info on what you did to make it work (cables, drivers, cards, etc.)?

Thanks in advance,

Lara Friedman-Shedlov

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Lara D. Friedman-Shedlov    (she / they)  (hear my name)

Digital Records Archivist | Archives & Special Collections 

University of Minnesota Libraries | lib.umn.edu | 612.626.7972

I acknowledge that the University of Minnesota is located on the traditional, ancestral and contemporary lands of Indigenous people and was built with money from slaveholders. 

[David Cirella]

Hi Lara,

We have done some work with SyQuest 200MB discs in the past. It was some time ago, but it wasn't too much trouble to get it running.

We connected the SyQuest drive via a pci SCSI interface and ran Linux as the host OS (Lubuntu 16.04 32-bit). The lshw listing showed the following scsi card info, which had drivers included with the OS listed above:

-scsi
                description: SCSI storage controller
                product: TRM-S1040 [DC-315 / DC-395 series]
                vendor: Tekram Technology Co.,Ltd.
                physical id: 3
                bus info: pci@0000:02:03.0
                logical name: scsi4
                version: 01
                width: 32 bits
                clock: 33MHz
                capabilities: scsi pm bus_master cap_list rom scsi-host
                configuration: driver=dc395x latency=64
                resources: irq:19 ioport:ce00(size=256) memory:fe7db000-fe7dbfff memory:fe800000-fe80ffff

and the following lshw info for the SyQuest drive:

-disk
                   description: SCSI Disk
                   product: SQ5200C
                   vendor: SyQuest
                   physical id: 0.3.0
                   bus info: scsi@4:0.3.0
                   logical name: /dev/sdb
                   version: 3CE4
                   capacity: 211MiB (222MB)
                   capabilities: removable
                   configuration: ansiversion=2 logicalsectorsize=512 sectorsize=512

There were no drivers or software needed. I dd cloned the disc and after finding they were hfs formatted, was able to mount it for file transfer with something like:

$ mount /the_image_path/the_image.dsk /mnt/the_img -t hfs -o loop

I should be able to dig out some more info if there's anything more that would be helpful.

Best,

David

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David Cirella
(he/him/his)
Digital Preservation Librarian
Yale University Library
New Haven, CT

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[jessica.whyte]

Hi Lara,

Similar setup to David's - used a SCSI card and corresponding SCSI cable. Warning: there are many different SCSI connectors, so have a look at the drive you get and then choose your controller card and cable. Our 5.25" SyQuest drive has a 50-pin SCSI connector.

Your computer likely needs an available PCI slot for a SCSI card. We used an older computer for this, but we're looking into purchasing one of these modern systems that has PCI slots for legacy equipment: https://nixsys.com/legacy-computers/pci-slot-computers. You may also be able to find more modern PCI-e SCSI cards, I'm not sure. I'd love to know if someone else has found something like that and got it working.

If your SyQuest drive has two SCSI adaptors/connectors (usually external ones), you may need to also make sure the unused connector is terminated. We also had to turn on the SCSI drive before booting, but once it was going, Ubuntu recognized it no problem and it was a straight, typical transfer after that.

[Lara Friedman-Shedlov]

Thank you to Jessica and David for your tips.  I'm currently in the processing of acquiring a drive and then I'll see if I can get it running.

Best,

Lara

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