Hey all,
I wanted to share something neat I picked up at VCF Midwest this year, a Tecmar Mac Drive, perhaps the first external hard drive for the Macintosh. This drive uses a serial port to connect to the Mac, and some software shenanigans to get around the storage size limitations of the initial Macintosh file system.
The seller, Peter, who's a fan of the channel, graciously accepted my $40 offer for this hunk of metal. And boy, is this thing a chonker! It took the combined strength of me and @eric to open the case. Inside appears to be a 10MB MFM hard drive by Tandon, model TM 502. Despite not wanting to risk blowing the two RIFA caps in the unit, which looked a bit cracked, I was gently peer pressured into turning the drive on.
Thankfully, no explosions happened! The drive spins up, and the red light on the front blinks periodically. I can't see or hear the head moving. Although when it's off, the greased wheel toward the front of the drive allows the head to move.
It didn't come with any cables, but I used a straight through serial cable from the free pile to plug in the drive to my Mac 512k. However, the Tecmar software (we tried multiple versions) simply say the drive can't be recognized. It's unknown if that means it can't see the drive, or if the drive isn't formatted, or what.
So I'll have to tinker with it more... but I'm curious, has anyone else owned this kind of drive?
They made a model that had a smaller drive inside, but also had a removable SyQuest cartridge drive, which is cool. Apparently the model I have is the 2nd revision, as it has a 2nd serial port for plugging a printer into. BTW, the paper taped to the top of the machine says to plug the hard drive into the Modem port of the Mac, and plug the printer into Serial 2 on the hard drive.
The drive has two layers of boards (at least) inside to convert it the thing to serial. Apparently some reports indicate that the drive can be converted to SCSI. There is a 50-pin ribbon cable on one of the boards, but I'd like to inspect the chips further to determine what signals actually may be being sent through it. Also, the software tricks to make this thing into multiple partitions may simply not work if connected via SCSI? Who knows...
I did end up replacing the two RIFA caps, just in case. The drive spins up and sounds normal, but again the head doesn't seem to be accessing. Perhaps this is only done once the software sends a command? Or maybe something inside isn't happy.
Either way, enjoy this chonk from 1985!
-Steve
I wanted to share something neat I picked up at VCF Midwest this year, a Tecmar Mac Drive, perhaps the first external hard drive for the Macintosh. This drive uses a serial port to connect to the Mac, and some software shenanigans to get around the storage size limitations of the initial Macintosh file system.
The seller, Peter, who's a fan of the channel, graciously accepted my $40 offer for this hunk of metal. And boy, is this thing a chonker! It took the combined strength of me and @eric to open the case. Inside appears to be a 10MB MFM hard drive by Tandon, model TM 502. Despite not wanting to risk blowing the two RIFA caps in the unit, which looked a bit cracked, I was gently peer pressured into turning the drive on.
Thankfully, no explosions happened! The drive spins up, and the red light on the front blinks periodically. I can't see or hear the head moving. Although when it's off, the greased wheel toward the front of the drive allows the head to move.
It didn't come with any cables, but I used a straight through serial cable from the free pile to plug in the drive to my Mac 512k. However, the Tecmar software (we tried multiple versions) simply say the drive can't be recognized. It's unknown if that means it can't see the drive, or if the drive isn't formatted, or what.
So I'll have to tinker with it more... but I'm curious, has anyone else owned this kind of drive?
They made a model that had a smaller drive inside, but also had a removable SyQuest cartridge drive, which is cool. Apparently the model I have is the 2nd revision, as it has a 2nd serial port for plugging a printer into. BTW, the paper taped to the top of the machine says to plug the hard drive into the Modem port of the Mac, and plug the printer into Serial 2 on the hard drive.
The drive has two layers of boards (at least) inside to convert it the thing to serial. Apparently some reports indicate that the drive can be converted to SCSI. There is a 50-pin ribbon cable on one of the boards, but I'd like to inspect the chips further to determine what signals actually may be being sent through it. Also, the software tricks to make this thing into multiple partitions may simply not work if connected via SCSI? Who knows...
I did end up replacing the two RIFA caps, just in case. The drive spins up and sounds normal, but again the head doesn't seem to be accessing. Perhaps this is only done once the software sends a command? Or maybe something inside isn't happy.
Either way, enjoy this chonk from 1985!
-Steve
But I'm open to suggestions. I did take a quick visual peek inside of the lid of the hard drive and it looked to be in good shape with no scratches, etc.
I only have the one straight through serial cable, but I'm unsure how the original was wired. So many variables!