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What to avoid, or things that will fail... and fail

Jackson

Jackson

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2015
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North Carolina
What often fails so that I know what to avoid buying in terms of vintage hardware; in which not even a repair can be possible, or if it could be, guarantee a long term life? I already am steering clear of Jaz drives, SPARQ drives, and those epoxy power supplies from Commodore...

Care to think of anything else that others like me should avoid? Don't want to end up wasting time and money.
 
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Unfortunately, I have one! $15 was too good to pass up on... And to explain the Jaz and the SPARQ drives, the Jaz drive I got had a dead motor. The SPARQ drive was bad, and of course, disks I had that came with it didn't work and got thrown out.

Thankfully, I got the SPARQ for free! Thrown that out as well. But hey, free cable! And a power supply... which I might use with VDC to VAC inverter to create a power supply for my C64.
 
PS/2 Floppy drives in particular.

I'd say St506 drives, but they seem to either be dead now or they just keep going. Just thrown out 4 '90s IDE drives.

I try to keep spares of everything. If you can swap out components you're usually halfway to fixing something.
 
Old PSU AC (rice paper?) filter caps pre-1982 or so will usually fail and smoke soon after booting an old machine. Best to preemptively replace them I've found.

Tez
 
In my experience: Octagon hard drives, Plus Hard Cards, and Tandon/early Western Digital 3.5" hard drives (WD bought Tandon's hard drive operation). The custom IC's in Commodore 64s (SID & PLA mostly). The keyboards that came with the early Compaq portables.

Spares are crucial for me.
 
Kazblox said:
Unfortunately, I have one! $15 was too good to pass up on... And to explain the Jaz and the SPARQ drives, the Jaz drive I got had a dead motor. The SPARQ drive was bad, and of course, disks I had that came with it didn't work and got thrown out.

Thankfully, I got the SPARQ for free! Thrown that out as well. But hey, free cable! And a power supply... which I might use with VDC to VAC inverter to create a power supply for my C64.
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I have several jaz drives I havent fired up in years (1 and 2gb model) any preventative maintenance I can do to keep them going?
 
VERAULT said:
I have several jaz drives I havent fired up in years (1 and 2gb model) any preventative maintenance I can do to keep them going?
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Keep the dirt off of them and make sure you always have the drive horizontal and flat when you run the drive, else bad things happen. Unlike ZIP drives, JAZ drives were never designed or intended to work vertically.
 
Kazblox said:
And a power supply... which I might use with VDC to VAC inverter to create a power supply for my C64.
Click to expand...
Apparently those are not viable nor does one that converts 12VDC into 9VAC exists. The case is so big enough that I could just completely fit in a different board, though. But how to open it won't be trivial...
 
Caluser2000 said:
Yeah having spares is useful. Did you give those IDE drives a tap test?
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If by tap test you mean checking for stiction, yes. One was a quantum that had bearing problems. I managed to image it perfectly literally just before it died. Next power up, it spun up then immediately spun down, after that it was no more.
 
mR_Slug said:
If by tap test you mean checking for stiction, yes. One was a quantum that had bearing problems. I managed to image it perfectly literally just before it died. Next power up, it spun up then immediately spun down, after that it was no more.
Click to expand...

Sometimes you can drill two opposing holes into the bearing housing and blast in fresh lubricant and force the old stuff out. It's a bit of trial and error, but if you only drill a bit at a time, you'll eventually get to where the bearing race is.

I have one Quantum drive which would only spin up when inverted, but replacing the grease with a light machine oil made it start spinning up reliably again.
 
As Gig says, keep 'em clean. I used a SCSI Jaz drive for years with no apparent problems. Way better than the ZIP and more reasonable, price-wise, than the Bernoulli's of the day.
 
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