Increase the removable storage capacity in your CMD HD Drive
This article first appeared in print in the August/September 2005 issue of The Infinite Loop newsletter.
In December 2004 there was a discussion on the Homestead list about CMD HD-Zip drives and their benefits and problems. On December 12, Patrick Robinson entered the discussion and brought up the fact the Magneto Optical (MO) Drives and disks (up to 540 MB in size) provide a more reliable method for storing lots of data than Zip Drives and disks (100 or 250 MB size). Further discussion ensued on the subject and I decided to look into these drives as an alternative to the Zip Drive I had installed in my second HD.
Of course, eBay is the place to look for the older technology since somebody had mentioned a price over $300 for a new drive. After looking for a few weeks I won an auction for a Fujitsu MCC3064SS internal SCSI 3.5” MO Drive. The auction included a controller card for a PC, manuals, PC software and a number of 640 MB disks. The 640 MB disks can’t be used on the Commodore as they utilize 2 KB size sectors whereas the CMD controller only writes 512 Byte size sectors. The largest 3.5” MO Media that can be used is 540 MB disks (they write 512 Byte sectors) and I soon found an auction for 5 brand new 540 MB disks.
Since I wasn’t in a big hurry to get these items, and to save money on customs, duty and shipping charges, I had the sellers ship the items to Earl Williams in Colorado. Earl was kind enough to store these items (plus quite a few other items I bought) at his house and then he hauled them to Las Vegas to give to me at CommVEx. This allowed me to do a quick demo on using the MO Drive in a CMD HD case on day 2 of CommVEx.
When I opened the box with the MO Drive I handed the drive over to SWRAP’s Eric (Mr. SCSI) Kudzin who was sitting nearby in need of something to do. Eric quickly got the jumpers set right to work with the CMD HD. I had brought my C-128D System to CommVEx along with my CMD HD drive. I only planned to demo this as a proof of concept and, if it worked, would replace the Zip Drive in my other HD once I got home.
I removed the upper case of the HD and disconnected the power and SCSI cables from the internal HDD. With an anti-static bag providing some protection between the drives I set the MO on top of the HDD mechanism and connected the cables. I then loaded CREATE SYS from the HD Utilities disk in my FD-2000 and proceeded to setup a 540 MB MO Disk. Once the system was working I ran HD TOOLS and created some partitions. Everything was going smoothly.
Next I booted Wheels from the FD-2000 drive and made sure I could access the new partitions on the MO Disk. I then ran MakeSysDisk and created a bootable Wheels partition on the MO. With this done I shut down the system and then powered up only the 128D and the HD MO Drive. I was able to boot Wheels and work with it. The drive worked flawlessly.
So, with these initial tests out of the way I proceeded to do a demo later in the day where I used a different MO Disk and followed the same steps I had in my earlier testing. Everything went well with the demo and when I got home, as planned, the Zip drive came out and the MO drive went into my second HD. No modifications were required to my mounting brackets as the holes are in the same locations on the 2 different drives.
Figure 1 shows the size of a MO disk compared to the size of a Zip disk. Figure 2 shows the HD unit with the Zip Drive installed and Figure 3 shows the HD unit with the MO drive installed. I now have to change the label to say HD-540 on the drive.
If you want to increase your storage capacity you may want to check out a Magneto Optical drive to use in your CMD HD.
Bruce Thomas
Figure 1 - Comparison of MO disk and Zip disk physical size.
The MO disk holds 540 MB whereas the Zip disk only holds 100 MB.
Figure 2 - The MO drive on top of the HD unit before installation
Figure 3 - The MO drive installed and the Zip drive on top of the HD unit after installation