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Transfer of Files from old SCSI drive
Hi all
Newbie here. And self described ‘button-pusher’.
Hoping someone might be able to help with an conversion thoughts for an OLD!! Avid 4GB SCSI drive I have to get the files off.Let me say that it was REFORMATTED to work with PC years ago, and I was using it for ( I believe) AVI files edited via Adobe Premier. Avid protocol and files were wiped, to make it a stand alone SCSI drive.
The drive is an older standalone, with Centronics CN50 connector (and terminator)
Wondering if anyone knows a conversion path to get that to Firewire, or USB, or ??
Footage is really unimportant. I believe it’s a small personal project. But I think it’s my daughter from about 15-18yrs ago. Which would be fun to see.Thanks in advance for any thoughts…and certainly ‘toss it in the trash’ could be a ‘thought’. ha!
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4 Replies
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Several solutions…
You could get a USB to SCSI cable ~$30 and then find the necessary cables to get to the Centronics 50pin.
With said USB adaptor, take the drive out of the case and find a different cable to go from, presumably a DB25 in the USB adaptor, to the 50 pin header on the drive.
Find a PCIe SCSI card. I looked, they are out there. Again, theres the need to find cables.
Get an old PC from the era of the drive. The cards will be cheap. You can get a network card and connect it to whatever you have today. That drive could be mounted internally via ribbon cable to an old PCI Adaptec card. You can reconnect with old operating systems like Windows 2000.
I had to do something similar when I needed to read an old 720kb floppy drive.
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Thankyou Scott!
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Hi –
the problem is that even if you had the exact SCSI 1 card it was connected to, there are no drivers available for it any longer. If it was originally an AVID SCSI 1 drive, it’s a Seagate SCSI drive that was connected to an ATTO SCSI host adaptor (probably in an old Mac computer).Then you say, it was connected to a PC (what PC) – Windows NT, Windows 95, Windows 98 ? I assume it’s not a RAID, so from the stone age, I am going to assume that it’s an Adaptec SCSI 1 card. So the most reliable way to get this to run is to find an old PC of this vintage (which should be available on ebay for 10 bucks and shipping) but you need the Adaptec SCSI 1 adaptor and SCSI 1 Centronics 50 pin cable (good luck finding that).
Isn’t there a way to adapt this, with some stuff from Newegg or Other World Computing to USB, Firewire so you can get it to run on your Mac at home – ABSOLUTELY NOT. If it was important, you should have transferred it.
SO, in case you are thinking about this, and saying “what a shame” – when you take pictures or little movies of your daughter, and possibly grand daughter/son in the near future, and those are wonderful memories for you, and you want to see them in 20 years, you must TRANSFER YOUR DATA either to modern media of the day, and if you will be 80 in 20 years, and can’t be bothered with all that stuff, then PAY for a cloud site storage, so they can take care of it for you. Because you could buy a new camera today, with a SanDisk SD card, shoot wonderful pictures of your grandchild, and you will NOT be able to see them in 20 years, unless you keep transferring the data to modern formats, or have a cloud site do this for you.
There ain’t no free lunch. Never has been, never will be. Want to see those 8mm films of your grandparents – get prepared to PAY someone to do this for you.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com -
Thanks for reply Bob!
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