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Iomega Beta 90 drives and media

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gslick

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Anyone have much experience using Iomega Beta 90 drives and media? How reliable are they over the years? Is their performance reasonable for use on systems of similar vintage?

I just picked up an external box with two Beta 90 drives. One is a 90A which is the SCSI master drive with the usual 50-pin connector. The other is a 90B which is slaved to the 90A via a 26-pin cable and has no SCSI interface of its own. I assume the drives must appear as two LUNs at the same SCSI bus address.

The box came with no 90MB media cartridges. If I try to find some used 90MB media on eBay or elsewhere are there reasonable chances that the drives and media would still be good?

Anyone have any 90MB media cartridges for which they no longer have any need?
 
Had one at a previous employer. Very reliable. Performance was good enough for the server it was attached to.

Based on a number of threads here and elsewhere, the odds are very good that drive and media will work. IIRC, the 40MB (or 44MB*) cartridges will also work in the 90MB model and easier to find the last time I searched for some.

* I think the cartridge was marketed as both sizes at different times to match the capacity numbers of SyQuest.

I think the drives will be separate LUNs but I am not sure. I don't want my hazy memories from 25 years ago damaging your drives.
 
krebizfan said:
Based on a number of threads here and elsewhere, the odds are very good that drive and media will work. IIRC, the 40MB (or 44MB*) cartridges will also work in the 90MB model and easier to find the last time I searched for some.
Click to expand...

I have the impression from limited information out there that the 90MB drive might be read-only backwards compatible with the 44MB media cartridges, not read-write. I haven't seen definitive info about that yet.

I haven't found any manuals for the 90MB drive yet. Maybe there was a thread here from a few years ago where Chuck said he had a manual for the 90MB drive.
 
The technology was great at the time and they are not as fast as real hard drives, but for removable media they are very fast. With their size and speeds they can be used as hard drive substitutes easily.

Iomega was not great about backwards compatibility. The 20MB cartridges basically can't be read in anything except the original 20MB drives. The 44s, 90s, 150s, and 230s all have restrictions on them too. There is a table somewhere you can consult to see what is readable and writable. In general, newer drives can always read older media, and possibly write to it. But older drives will never work with newer media.

I've had good luck with the 20MB cartridges that I found on eBay. 90s will probably be fine. I had problems with 230s, but I don't know if it was the media or my drive and it started getting too expensive to figure it out.


Mike
 
Got a dual-drive unit. Haven't powered it up for a couple of years, but I don't recall any problems with it. My documentation for it is probably better, as it came directly as an evaluation unit from Iomega.

So if you've got questions, fire away and I'll do my best to find an answer.
 
I went ahead and took my luck with some used 90MB cartridges. I'll find out if the drives and cartridges work in a week or so when they arrive.

The external drive box is actually a Bering MultiPac 7902 with an HP-IB interface implementing the CS/80 protocol. Maybe I will be able to get it to work with HP 85 series systems just for fun, although using it with an HP 1000 series system would be more appropriate.

It's something similar to this MultiPac Jaz box, but a generation or two earlier:
http://bering.com/doc/brochure/multipac.pdf
 
Is there any information that can only be written at the factory on these cartridges, such as some sort of servo tracks? Or can the cartridges be completely magneticly erased and low level formatted on standard end user drives?
 
gslick said:
Is there any information that can only be written at the factory on these cartridges, such as some sort of servo tracks? Or can the cartridges be completely magneticly erased and low level formatted on standard end user drives?
Click to expand...

There are servo tracks on the cartridge. File system formats are all you can do.
 
Today (nov 15th) I was going through some old removable-media drives, checking the Web to see if these are of current interest. Found of course, this thread.

I have two of the 90MB Bernoulli branded external drives, one SyQuest 88MB drive, two 440MB "infinity 40 turbo" drives which look externally like the SyQuest. These all look very similar; I don't know that the SyQuests are Bernoulli compatible. Comments?

Herb Johnson
retrotechnology.com
 
They may look similar, but the SQ800 carts are Syquest-specific. Physically, I'm not even sure that they'll fit in a Bernoulli drive. Bernoulli disks are true floppies (thin flexible media); ISTR that Syquest are rigid.

Bernoulli technology is pretty interesting. It's based on the demonstration for kids where you take a playing card, a thread spool and a pin (to keep the card centered over the spool center hole) and blow through the spool onto the card to find that the card doesn't fly away, but remains attracted to the spool as long as one keeps blowing. Totally non-instinctive.
 
The Infinity 40 are rebranded SyQuest drives using the 40MB version of the 5.25" disk which is the earlier version of the SyQuest 88MB drive. SyQuest made at least 2 models of the 88MB drive: early 88 which can read 44MB cartridges and the later 88c which can read and write 44MB disks. I don't know if Peripheral Land used a compatible format in the Infinity 40.
 
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