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3.5" HH to 5.25" HH mounting adapters?

O

Old Thrashbarg

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Jul 7, 2009
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I've been pawing through my box full of drive adapters, trying to figure out how to mount this old Quantum SCSI drive into my PC6300 XT. It's a 3.5" drive, but it's half-height, rather than the 1" low-profile of most 3.5" drives. Partly because of the fact that it's taller than other 3.5" drives, and partly because the mounting holes on this old drive are different from the ones on newer drives, I can't find an adapter that will work for fitting it into a 5.25" HH bay.

So my questions: what did the "proper" adapters for these drives look like, and any ideas where I might be able to find such a thing? I know they existed, as I used to have that drive mounted in my Laser XT clone back in the day, and it also only had 5.25" bays... I just can't remember how it was done.

Alternately, if anyone has improvised something for the purpose, how did you end up rigging it?
 
Well, it's been a little while for myself since I've had to play with half-height drives or bay adapters, but from memory I can't imagine it being that difficult to adapt a standard adapter to fit the drive in question.

Assuming that there's no 'alignment tabs' on the adapter that would interfere with the positioning of the HH drive one would simply need to drill new mounting holes, depending on the shape of the adapter a clearance hole may need to be drilled in the outer flange to access the position of the mounting hole... If there were some sort of tabs in the way these could be taken care of with either a dremel type tool or just a good old manual file.

Custom adapters could also be built, but this can be overly difficult without access to the proper equipment. Especially when existing brackets could be adapted with less work.
 
Old Thrashbarg said:
Partly because of the fact that it's taller than other 3.5" drives, and partly because the mounting holes on this old drive are different from the ones on newer drives, I can't find an adapter that will work for fitting it into a 5.25" HH bay.
Click to expand...
How different are the mounting holes on the 3.5" drive? There are brackets with long slots instead of holes which may fit, unless the holes in the drive itself are offset too far vertically for it to fit in the bay.
 
It probably would not be too hard to make a mounting plate from an old CD drive, if the top (or the bottom) of it is a plate that can be removed. Take out the insides (including front and back), then drill some holes in the remaining bottom plate matching the bottom-mount holes on the drive. This assumes the drive has holes on the bottom for mounting, but I think most do. I'm also assuming that the drive bays in that machine have the correct holes to side-mount a CD drive, but the form factor of normal-sized CD drives has been the same since they first came out, so I would imagine so.
 
Well, it looks as though it may not be a necessary venture anyway... the drive seems to have died just now. :(

But, for clarification... to be specific, it's an old Quantum Prodrive. There are two mounting holes on each side, about 2" apart, slightly more than halfway towards the rear of the drive. They're also set higher on the side of the drive, compared to the ones on a normal 1" drive, but they're set a little lower than the bottom row of holes on a 5.25" drive.
 
For closure, the proper drive mounts for older drives to go into 5.25" bays have long slots along the sides so that any mounting holes will line up, and they're typically gold-colored (as many metal pieces in that era were).
 
Well, I have some rails with the long slots on the sides, but they didn't quite line up vertically... in other words, I could attach 'em to the drive without a problem, but then I couldn't fit the drive into the bay and screw it in.

I dunno, maybe the drive just had some sort of proprietary/non-standard mounting system... wouldn't really surprise me. Doesn't really matter now, anyway.
 
How about bottom-mounting? Many adapters have a hole pattern for attaching to the threaded bosses on the bottom of a drive. Better yet, get a "tray" type of adapter rather than the side-rail type (I have a few if you're interested) and drill your own holes in the bottom.
 
Any sort of bottom-mounting setup would make it too tall to fit in a HH drive bay. Besides, once again, the holes don't line up to anything standard.
 
Well, let's quit shoveling smoke and get down to some real situations.

I'm sitting here with a Seagate ST15230WC "Hawk" SCSI drive. It's one of several I purchased about 12 years ago. It measures 1 3/4 tall. Measuring the side mounting holes, using the frontmost one as a 0" reference, I have two more holes, one at 2 3/4" and the rearmost at 4". I also have a batch of "short" mounting adapters that match up with the frontmost two holes and provide standard 5.25" bottom and side threaded holes.

Is this what you're looking for? I've got a bunch of the adapters. They're also used to mount 3.5" DDS drives in 5.25" slots.
 
Well, as I said earlier, the drive died, turning this into a purely academic discussion. I don't suppose there's really a lot of point in continuing with it.
 
Well, I have some Quantum SCSI Prodrives on my site. A 40S, a 210S and a 540 LPS and, if you wanted to buy one, I'd find and fit the right brackets to it (I have BOXES full of them LOL).
 
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