Which external scsi cdrom for an A3000

[BIG-IRON]

Well I won the A3000 on ebay and im really happy, now Im thinking of what else I need and external cdrom is number 1 on the hit list. Which ones can I use I know its scsi2 but is a db25 connector (the external 1) different than most? what are you all using? can I use a cd player that holds more than 1?

[melott]

@Big-Iron

You are one excited puppy ...( :-P thats great)

I have an external SCSI box attached to my A3k.
I have a 9 gig HD and an internal CD Rom in the box.
Works great, and I've tried several different brands
of used CD Roms and all worked fine.

[Acill]

Your best bet would be to buy an internal CD drive on ebay and then look for an external case to put it in. Most any will work just fine. This is what I did for mine A3000 before I put it in a tower. You should find a drive for a few bucks and tons of cases for less then $10. I think I paid $5 for the one I got.

[Dalamar]

I got an 8x Panasonic External CDROM on ebay for $10.  It's worked great with my 3k.  This was about 2 months ago.

[Jope]

Acill wrote:
Your best bet would be to buy an internal CD drive on ebay and then look for an external case to put it in. Most any will work just fine. This is what I did for mine A3000 before I put it in a tower. You should find a drive for a few bucks and tons of cases for less then $10. I think I paid $5 for the one I got.

I'm with Acill. External drives are harder to find and more expensive... It's easier to get a SCSI box and an internal drive to go in it.

Basically, that's all the external drives are too. :-)

[Holley]

SCSI 1 is out of the back of the  A3000 on an Apple style 25 pin D plug, and inside it's on a  standard SCSI 1 low-density 50 pin ribbon-type plug on the MB.  

External SCSI 1 boxes come in both high and low density Centronix connector types, it's easier to find 25 pin D to low-density Centronix leads as they're standard Apple fare!

If you have a mix of 1 and 2 devices it should work, but will end up looking messy :-(

If your A3000 has a harddisk already you may need to remove the termintors on the motherboard before an external drive can be used ... not hard to do, but hard to undo ...

And I've got a 4x reader and 8x writer for mine, the leads cost more than the drives :lol:

[amipal]

@ Big-IRON

Congrats on the eBay win! I've recently been building up my Amiga collection (desktops atm) and an A3000 would be my next stop... ;-)

@ Holley
Thats the thing with SCSI - everything is expensive compared to IDE, even the cabling! Still, the performance is worth it :-)

[Holley]

Yeah, I'm not impressed with serial-ATA so far :?

Seems to be plenty of SCSI leads etc on ebay, the cost of my drives is £0 BTW - thats why the leads were more expensive ;-)

I'm looking for an accellerator with fast/wide now as I've just bagged a couple of ex-raid disks with cables - they're a wee bit bigger than my 1Gb drive, lol.  Also trying to wangle a DDS3 Dat drive, but I can't think of a use for it :-P

[spihunter]

There's always cheap Apple & Sunsparc scsi external cd-roms on ebay. alot of them are the old caddy style. I had a sun drive on my A3000 and it worked great.

[AmigaPete]

Hey Big,
If you want an internal 4x speed Toshiba (no caddy required) or an external 2x speed (NEC CDR-38, uses DB25 to Centronics, IIRC, reads multisession discs, has a flip-up lid, no caddy required) - they are both gathering dust, but still work fine as of about two months ago. $15 plus shipping (within continental NA) and they are both yours. :-)

Let me know,
Pete

[melott]

@Holley

Ummm .... I'm pretty sure the SCSI controller on
the A3000 is a SCSI 2. (I could be wrong  :-? )