Transferring legacy SCSI to modern drives?

[igirl]

Like the title says - I've got a ton of Jaz, Syquest, CD-ROM disks and would love to be able to consolidate it all to USB and lose all that old hardware which has been boxed up and out of sight for years.

 

I see there are now quite a few adapters on Amazon (a few years back no one was selling these) - so I'm wondering if anyone has experience/referrals to known working adapters that could accomplish the data transfer on MacOS?

 

In particular I'm looking at the K2700 - hoping it would be able to load legacy samples and programs similar to SCSI loading on the K2000 era instruments - but with tons more speed - otherwise it would be pointless.   Interestingly the support blurb on K2700 drive compatibility only mentions thumb drives.  This would be a strange limitation - why not a regular external HDD/SSD?  No problem I guess.  Even a little 64GB GB thumb drive could hold far more than I have in the archives!

[Al Coda]

Well, I doubt there are generic SCSI adapters to USB or whatelse to connect old SCSI drives directly to modern PCs or MACs.

 

I do it w/ a old MAC G3 Powerbook "Lombard" which provides a SCSI connector for a "cubic plug" to 50-pol "Centronics" cable.

It runs Mac OS 9.22 and I also run "SCSI Director" application on that powerbook.

In addition, I use a PCM/CIA card providing 2 Firewire ports for ext. Firewire HDDs.

Not enough, I stock 2 USB floppy drives.

That way I can connect every ancient SCSI drive (HDD, optical, Jaz, Syquest and MOD to the Powerbook Lombard and transfer content to ext. HDDS I put into a FiWi case.

 

The old application CD-Xtract converts AKAI, EMU, Kurzweil into Halion, Kontakt, WAV and SF2 sample formats as also (partially) bi-directional across the formats.

I´m using it on a WinXP SP3 PC, which also runs the ASPI driver for an Adaptec SCSI card w/ a SCSI II (or higher) connector.

There´s also a "Texas Instruments" chipset driven USB2 (3 ports) and FiWi (2 ports) combo card in the PC, so I´m able to copy (converted) content across all kind of drives.

 

For the big 5.25" MOD media, I stock my old AKAI DD1000 reading such media.

I can put it in a SCSI chain on demand.

 

Up to now, I´ve never found any other ways to get those jobs done.

 

Only for EMU and Oberheim DPX-1 exists such a (serial) toy,-

EMuSer

 

☺️

 

A.C.

 

[igirl]

Sad if that's all there is to accomplish this.  I previously had a PowerMac 8500 tower with a USB card but it died.  😞  I suppose if I'm able to locad things and save via floppy - but that's a ton of time and floppies!

[Morrissey]

Please stop bragging about your fancy Jaz drives.  Some of us could only afford the little brother Zip drive.

 

It all seems so quaint now.

[David Emm]

The number of floppies I discarded when that era died kicked Mother Earth in the nads twice over. The road to Hell is paved with dead formats, alien female-to-female adapter cords and scratched "Porky's" DVDs.

[KuruPrionz]

Just write new code on punchcards and enter it into an IBM mainframe the size of an elephant. 

[Docbop]

1 hour ago, KuruPrionz said:

Just write new code on punchcards and enter it into an IBM mainframe the size of an elephant. 

I was a student at UCLA Extension taking CompSci classes and full time students were still having to create punch cards to run assignments.  They even had vending machines that sold blank punch cards.   I was lucky my class we could code on terminals and submit our jobs.   My second quarter the school finally got off punch cards and there was a huge party on campus when the last card machine was loaded on a truck and taken away.   The really weird thing to me was the CompSci building had a display of early bead memory from one of the mainframes.   It looked like window screen with these little beads at each cross junction.  Amazing how much things have shrunk.

[KuruPrionz]

8 minutes ago, Docbop said:

I was a student at UCLA Extension taking CompSci classes and full time students were still having to create punch cards to run assignments.  They even had vending machines that sold blank punch cards.   I was lucky my class we could code on terminals and submit our jobs.   My second quarter the school finally got off punch cards and there was a huge party on campus when the last card machine was loaded on a truck and taken away.   The really weird thing to me was the CompSci building had a display of early bead memory from one of the mainframes.   It looked like window screen with these little beads at each cross junction.  Amazing how much things have shrunk.

 

I saw one of those huge mainframes somewhere a long time ago. Glad I didn't have to learn on one!!!

 

My first spin on a computer was Mom's "doorstop Mac". She got the ultra deluxe-o-matic 1.4 megabyte floppy drive, it was bigger than the hard drive. 

My second spin was at college on a DOS contraption that required code entry to do anything - ya gotta type before ya kin type.

 

It made zero sense to me why they couldn't get around that. They did. 

[igirl]

12 hours ago, KuruPrionz said:

Just write new code on punchcards and enter it into an IBM mainframe the size of an elephant. 

I took a very progressive "data processing" class in high school - the machines used punch cards!

Saving off of SCSI drives in a vintage Mac to CD-R might also be a remote possibility though slow, and laborious!

[igirl]

On 4/20/2022 at 9:53 AM, Al Coda said:

I do it w/ a old MAC G3 Powerbook "Lombard" which provides a SCSI connector for a "cubic plug" to 50-pol "Centronics" cable.

It runs Mac OS 9.22 and I also run "SCSI Director" application on that powerbook.

 

I think you have identified the only Mac model to have ever offered SCSI plus USB (or FW) together without adding cards/drivers etc.

 

Assuming I were able to find one working somewhere along with the adapter (cube to Centronics, which seems widely available) - is it plug and play simple?  I don't want to do anything other than connect two drives and copy from one to the other.  SCSI to USB.  Any issues with drivers or programs needed to make this work ( "SCSI Director" for instance)?

[obxa]

Following this post.   I was just researching this for the K2000 and old Roland S550 sampler.   I don't have the link handy, but there are a few guys from the UK who sell thumb drive retrofits for a bunch of the legacy Sampler machines.   Of course getting your custom sounds/patches onto them onto thumbs in the first place is the issue, but  a few of the vendors are including the  complete stock libraries.

 

[ProfD]

On 4/20/2022 at 11:56 AM, igirl said:

...lose all that old hardware which has been boxed up and out of sight for years.

First, I would check eBay for a SCSI to USB solution.

 

The real question is the importance of files that have been boxed up and out of sight for a long time. 

 

If it's sounds, the newer KBs probably have a reasonable facsimile.  Recorded sequence and song files can be recreated. 

 

I'm certain I could destroy all of the floppy disks and zip disks I have not used in two decades and wouldn't miss the data one byte, er, bit. 😁😎

[kaptainkeys]

Why not use a K2xxxS that has the SCSI port and auto-sample the sounds into soundfont or EXS format?  It won't give you the raw waveforms but will give you the presets as they are heard straight off the originals, especially if you use a really clean un-colored preamp/converter or a synth with a digital output of some kind.

[Al Coda]

On 5/3/2022 at 6:33 PM, igirl said:

 

I think you have identified the only Mac model to have ever offered SCSI plus USB (or FW) together without adding cards/drivers etc.

 

Powerbook G3 Lombard (or "bronze") offers just only USB 1.1 which I´d nevvewr recommend to transfer larger files because of slow speed.

The SCSI port is VERY welcome, but I added a dual port FireWire (PCM/CIA) card for file transfers via SCSI.

 

You can do the same w/ a old (beige) G3 Mac desktop machine and inserting an additional PCI multi-port FiWi card.

You´ll find all cheap at ebay or craiglist etc..

 

I only needed drivers for Windows machines and Adaptec SCSI card.

 

On 5/3/2022 at 6:33 PM, igirl said:

 

Assuming I were able to find one working somewhere along with the adapter (cube to Centronics, which seems widely available) - is it plug and play simple?  I don't want to do anything other than connect two drives and copy from one to the other.  SCSI to USB.  Any issues with drivers or programs needed to make this work ( "SCSI Director" for instance)?

 

You only need the cube to Centronics cable for the Powerbook G3.

IIRC, the old Mac PPC desktop computers offer a SCSI port.

 

SCSI director is no driver, it´s a program recognizing and re-organizing SCSI IDs in a SCSI chain.

 

☺️

 

A.C.

[Al Coda]

On 5/3/2022 at 11:21 PM, obxa said:

Following this post.   I was just researching this for the K2000 and old Roland S550 sampler.   I don't have the link handy, but there are a few guys from the UK who sell thumb drive retrofits for a bunch of the legacy Sampler machines.   Of course getting your custom sounds/patches onto them onto thumbs in the first place is the issue, but  a few of the vendors are including the  complete stock libraries.

 

 

 

Not only in the U.K. !

 

But before you´re able to transfer your libraries to these "hardware retrofit" solutions, you´d  have to export from old storage media to today´s!

The real world problem keeps to export your own (or edited) libraries to new media,- not stock libraries.

Stock libraries are usually useless because these were only the ressources for creativity.

So,- when you used that stuff, you edited, made MIDI multi channel setups and so on.

Lots of work you want to save because IT WORKED and will work still.

 

☺️

 

A.C.

[obxa]

 

 Prof D and GotKeys  kinda hit the nail on the head.   Found a couple of  my signature K2k sounds I was easily able to sample into EXS and was nice to bring them to Logic.  A while ago had also used the old chicken systems software to extract some other sounds off  CD Roms.  I   To AlCoda's point, my S550 does have a bunch of custom Multis.    At least with the 550, not very hard to recreate those multis as needed.  Though I wonder if there is any current (or older) software that could enable one to do this within a computer environment. Probably time to reach out to Espen Kraft he's the guru on this kinda thing. 

 

This brings up a current dilemma  for me:, and wonder if anyone else has had this situation?

 

  I've got a  couple of older album  projects I really want to finish.  Been on Logic for 12+ years now.    But said albums are on my old Windows Machine,  in Sonar no less.  I recently bought a newer fast Windows machine with the idea  I'd resurrect everything with Bandcamp, instead of trying to export them to another DAW.

 Copied my songs files to the new SSD and quickly realized how awful I was back then at consistent naming/ housekeeping,  sound management, etc.   Not to mention how rusty I am using Windows.  For those  20 songs involved, it'd probably take me a year to recreate.   

 

Much as I want to salvage these projects, I'm thinking of just taking the rough mixes and  pulling those into Logic.   I could easily get them tempo synced and tart them up from there with what I currently know best and my modern tools.  Anyone else been down this same road?

 

BTW- the Mac Mini's from 2012 have SCSI.

 

[Tusker]

Since this is a one time salvage operation, you might look into a digitizing service in your town. These guys often do repair on old gear, convert old vhs to dvd, etc. They can be hard to find.

 

If you are lucky everything gets reduced to a thumb drive.