Rocky Mountains 12+ 5.25" external bays in an ATX case

[krebizfan]

Well I'd think the fact that noone is making 5.25" floppy disks might be a hindrance.

Given those operating new cassette tape factories, I would not be surprised to see a new floppy disk manufacturing plant start. Only need to sell a few million disks a year to make a decent profit. It does seem that thanks to poor storage the excess production ran out a lot sooner than I expected.

The other easy retro storage media would be the various magnetic cards. Surplus credit card production equipment should be readily available. Fortunately, the card readers needing major repairs because the rollers are now goo will preclude the return of the magnetic card.

 

[jafir]

There are still a bunch out there. For example I have this box under my bed:

 

[bolex]

I'm making some progress. I did get all 12 floppy drives assigned drive letters. Unfortunately, the logical access with the 2nd floppy controller is not working (not ready reading - abort, retry, fail). IMD seems to work just fine which makes me think it's a motherboard BIOS issue. I may swap the motherboard out with an older 386 and see if that has better results.

I also installed a USB ISA card which has been handy to get files to and from the system.

 

[bolex]

I'm going to call this little project complete. All the drives are working great. I did run out of black DSDD drives. I was hoping to make all my DSDD drives black and the 1.2Mb drives beige. I'm sure I'll run across another black drive in a few weeks.

 

[maxtherabbit]

Glorious

 

[NeXT]

 

[twolazy]

You sir, rock. I thought my tower was impressive with 4 floppy drives, ls120 and zip drive.

 

[Chuck(G)]

I guess nobody saw the interesting thing about the photo.

 

[twolazy]

Oh wow. Micro-solutions started out local to me???? I never knew they had offices in Dekalb. Explains why those Backpack external tape dives were so plentiful by me. Wish I kept a few intact. At least I have an external floppy drive outta it.

 

[Yoghoo]

Very cool project. Didn't know this was even possible. Thought 4 was the max.

 

[maxtherabbit]

please tell me this machine will actually be used to mass duplicate disks for distribution

 

[bolex]

please tell me this machine will actually be used to mass duplicate disks for distribution

I have no plans to use this for any kind of floppy disk duplication project, but my testing had good results. I made 6 copies of the DOS 3.3 2 disk DSDD set in about 4 minutes.

 

[SomeGuy]

Awesome. One can never have too many floppy drives.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Funny that they still don't see it...

 

[tradde]

I finally saw what you are talking about. Neat.

 

[bolex]

Just for kicks and giggles, I added 6 more floppy drives to give it a total of 18. The 6 additional ones are SCSI Floppy Drives.

 

[Plasma]

You added a CD-ROM drive? Heresy!

 

[the3dfxdude]

How many more drives until you hit a roll over bug in drive letters?

 

[bolex]

How many more drives until you hit a roll over bug in drive letters?

It goes up to drive U now so I guess it can take 5 more drives.

 

[Pickelhaube808]

I'm working on a project and need a computer case with at least 12 5.25" external bays. Links to eBay or other marketplaces would be appreciated.

The Antec twelve hundred, the LIAN Li PC-P80, the Lian Li PC-A77F, and the Xigmatek Elysium are a few cases that meet this criteria. I'm sure there are quite a few more out there.


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Sick... Filling it all with Thermaltake XRays I assume?