I have a Roland VS-880EX, which only has a SCSI interface for external
drives. When I got it, I decided not to buy the external CD-R drive. I
bought a 250MB zip drive for backup and archive. I mix down to DAT.

Now, I find zip disks are becoming scarce; Best Buy doesn't even sell
them any more.

I thought I might as well get an external CD-R. The official Roland
product lists for $399 and sells for about $250 or so. Other SCSI
external CD-Rs are nearly nonexistent while USB devices become more &
more prevalent and are in the $75-100 range.

Has anybody used or even seen a device to convert SCS to USB? I've
seen the reverse: a cable converter to allow connection of a SCSI drive
to a PC with USB ports.

Theodore Kloba wrote:
I have a Roland VS-880EX, which only has a SCSI interface for
external
drives. When I got it, I decided not to buy the external CD-R drive.
I
bought a 250MB zip drive for backup and archive. I mix down to DAT.

Now, I find zip disks are becoming scarce; Best Buy doesn't even sell
them any more.

I thought I might as well get an external CD-R. The official Roland
product lists for $399 and sells for about $250 or so. Other SCSI
external CD-Rs are nearly nonexistent while USB devices become more &
more prevalent and are in the $75-100 range.

Has anybody used or even seen a device to convert SCS to USB? I've
seen the reverse: a cable converter to allow connection of a SCSI
drive
to a PC with USB ports.

There are SCSI PCI cards, but you'd still want to put a drive between
the computer and the VS-880.

I thought Roland made internal burners ( that might just be a regular
ATA type drive ) to go with teh VS series.

Check ebay in the used Mac SCSI drives, though i leant a friend my
LaCie SCSI burner ( external ) and it wouldn't work with the VS-1880,
there are no drivers for it in the operating system.

There isa guy on ebay who deals in external Roland SCSI drives among other
equipment.He has good prices




Theodore Kloba wrote in message
oups.com...
I have a Roland VS-880EX, which only has a SCSI interface for external
drives. When I got it, I decided not to buy the external CD-R drive. I
bought a 250MB zip drive for backup and archive. I mix down to DAT.

Now, I find zip disks are becoming scarce; Best Buy doesn't even sell
them any more.

I thought I might as well get an external CD-R. The official Roland
product lists for $399 and sells for about $250 or so. Other SCSI
external CD-Rs are nearly nonexistent while USB devices become more &
more prevalent and are in the $75-100 range.

Has anybody used or even seen a device to convert SCS to USB? I've
seen the reverse: a cable converter to allow connection of a SCSI drive
to a PC with USB ports.

"Theodore Kloba" wrote in message
oups.com...
I have a Roland VS-880EX, which only has a SCSI interface for external
drives. When I got it, I decided not to buy the external CD-R drive. I
bought a 250MB zip drive for backup and archive. I mix down to DAT.

Now, I find zip disks are becoming scarce; Best Buy doesn't even sell
them any more.

I thought I might as well get an external CD-R. The official Roland
product lists for $399 and sells for about $250 or so. Other SCSI
external CD-Rs are nearly nonexistent while USB devices become more &
more prevalent and are in the $75-100 range.

Has anybody used or even seen a device to convert SCS to USB? I've
seen the reverse: a cable converter to allow connection of a SCSI drive
to a PC with USB ports.


This is a fairly common device, but it will cost you from 50 to 75 dollars.
You are very likely going to find a used scsi burner for much less.

jb

Unfortunately, being the owner of such a drive, I can tell you they're noisy
and slow. They do seem to be reliable though.

On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 18:03:02 GMT, "Troy" wrote:

There isa guy on ebay who deals in external Roland SCSI drives among other
equipment.He has good prices




Theodore Kloba wrote in message
roups.com...
I have a Roland VS-880EX, which only has a SCSI interface for external
drives. When I got it, I decided not to buy the external CD-R drive. I
bought a 250MB zip drive for backup and archive. I mix down to DAT.

Now, I find zip disks are becoming scarce; Best Buy doesn't even sell
them any more.

I thought I might as well get an external CD-R. The official Roland
product lists for $399 and sells for about $250 or so. Other SCSI
external CD-Rs are nearly nonexistent while USB devices become more &
more prevalent and are in the $75-100 range.

Has anybody used or even seen a device to convert SCS to USB? I've
seen the reverse: a cable converter to allow connection of a SCSI drive
to a PC with USB ports.

nmm wrote:
There are SCSI PCI cards, but you'd still want to put a drive between
the computer and the VS-880.

Yes... I'd rather not even involve my PC in the backup process if it's
not necessary.

I thought Roland made internal burners ( that might just be a regular
ATA type drive ) to go with teh VS series.

The newer ones, yes. The VS-880EX can only use and external SCSI
burner. It has one internal hard drive and no bays for more.

Check ebay in the used Mac SCSI drives, though i leant a friend my
LaCie SCSI burner ( external ) and it wouldn't work with the VS-1880,
there are no drivers for it in the operating system.

Not only that, but Roland has no list of compatible SCSI CD-R drives;
they do have a list for external HDs, magneto-optical, and a bunch of
other stuff.

Troy wrote:
There isa guy on ebay who deals in external Roland SCSI drives among
other
equipment.He has good prices

Any idea what his eBay ID is?

reddred wrote:
This is a fairly common device, but it will cost you from 50 to 75
dollars.
You are very likely going to find a used scsi burner for much less.

Any idea of a source for it? I thought it *should* be common, but I
only found the reverse version.

In article .com writes:

I have a Roland VS-880EX, which only has a SCSI interface for external
drives.

I thought I might as well get an external CD-R. The official Roland
product lists for $399 and sells for about $250 or so. Other SCSI
external CD-Rs are nearly nonexistent while USB devices become more &
more prevalent and are in the $75-100 range.

Has anybody used or even seen a device to convert SCS to USB?

A friend who has a house full of old Sun computers recently picked up
an IDE-SCSI adapter so he could use a DVD-R drive with one of his
computers, none of which have IDE interfaces. There's not much to it
so it probably doesn't cost much. I can get the particulars if you
can't dig it up yourself.

The thing is that the VS-880 may not recognize anything but the
official Roland drive. Seems like I remember something like that. One
of those lessons in life that I'm still trying to remember is that
when you buy something that has options that you think you might have
even a teeny need for, you'd better get the options then rather than
wait. Othewise they won't be available when you want them.



--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Theodore Kloba wrote:
reddred wrote:

This is a fairly common device, but it will cost you from 50 to 75 dollars.

You are very likely going to find a used scsi burner for much less.

Any idea of a source for it? I thought it *should* be common, but I
only found the reverse version.

I don't think you're likely to find one at all.

Controlling SCSI with USB is not so hard. The USB standard already
provides for mass storage devices, and it would be possible to
present the SCSI devices as just mass storage devices to the USB
bus.

But a true USB controller that hooks up via SCSI (the direction
you want) would be a lot harder. The main reason is that you can
plug in a whole lot of things into a USB port. What happens
if you plug in a printer? The USB end of the converter would
be able to interface with these things, but there is no standard
way to present them on the SCSI bus for the SCSI controller to
understand them. Likewise with many other devices.

So, if you made such a device, it would have to support only
storage devices. That would make it less useful, and you'd
have lots of customers who were upset when they found out
there was a very limited number of USB things they can plug
in and have them work.

I'm not saying such a device is impossible, but given that there
are lots of difficulties in making it, and given that most people
already have USB ports on their computer but don't have SCSI
ports, the ability to put a USB port on a SCSI bus is not in
very much demand. So if it's hard to make and nobody would
want to buy it, my guess is it probably doesn't exist.

- Logan

"Theodore Kloba" wrote in message
oups.com...
reddred wrote:
This is a fairly common device, but it will cost you from 50 to 75
dollars.
You are very likely going to find a used scsi burner for much less.

Any idea of a source for it? I thought it *should* be common, but I
only found the reverse version.


I'm really sorry, Mr. Shaw is correct. Your best bet is to go find an
appropriate scsi drive - though my suspicion is that your choice will be
limited to a few select drives.

jb

(Mike Rivers) writes:

A friend who has a house full of old Sun computers recently picked
up an IDE-SCSI adapter so he could use a DVD-R drive with one of his
computers, none of which have IDE interfaces. There's not much to it
so it probably doesn't cost much. I can get the particulars if you
can't dig it up yourself.

Acard make a couple of types, everyone seems happy with them.

The thing is that the VS-880 may not recognize anything but the
official Roland drive. Seems like I remember something like
that. One of those lessons in life that I'm still trying to remember
is that when you buy something that has options that you think you
might have even a teeny need for, you'd better get the options then
rather than wait. Othewise they won't be available when you want
them.

And remember:

There in no N in Turnkey.

--
Paul Repacholi 1 Crescent Rd.,
+61 (08) 9257-1001 Kalamunda.
West Australia 6076
comp.os.vms,- The Older, Grumpier Slashdot
Raw, Cooked or Well-done, it's all half baked.
EPIC, The Architecture of the future, always has been, always will be.

Mike Rivers wrote
Seems like I remember something like that. One
of those lessons in life that I'm still trying to remember is that
when you buy something that has options that you think you might have
even a teeny need for, you'd better get the options then rather than
wait. Othewise they won't be available when you want them.

Of course at the time I got the VS-880EX, there was not even a teeny
need for the CD-R, since I had (& still have) the SCSI zip drive for
archives and a DAT for mixdown.

Now the zip media is the only thing missing. Maybe I'll find an online
dealer and buy a boatload.

In article .com writes:

Now the zip media is the only thing missing. Maybe I'll find an online
dealer and buy a boatload.

Seems like the last time I was at Micro Center, I saw packs of Zip
disks. There's their listing on the web: http://tinyurl.com/3tc7a

They'll take your money on line. You can probably find cheaper prices
on eBay, from someone who wants $19.99 for shipping and handling or
some other such nonsense.



--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo

Mike Rivers wrote:

In article .com writes:


Now the zip media is the only thing missing. Maybe I'll find an online
dealer and buy a boatload.


Seems like the last time I was at Micro Center, I saw packs of Zip
disks. There's their listing on the web: http://tinyurl.com/3tc7a

Sheeeeesh, those are expensive. $30 for 300MB storage? It would be
a lot easier to just get that SCSI CD-RW. There's a Plextor SCSI
one on eBay right now with Buy It Now price of about $75 that says
even says it's "compatiable with earlier versions of the Roland VS
recorders".

- Logan

Fortunately I have the Zip 250, so I get 1GB for $40. I ended up
buying elsewhere for about the same price.

One advantage to the zip (over CDR) is that If I move a song to the
zip, it's still in a playable format. If I decide to remix after
archiving, I don't have to transfer the data again. I can just open it
up right there.

In article .com writes:

Fortunately I have the Zip 250, so I get 1GB for $40. I ended up
buying elsewhere for about the same price.

I just bought a brand new Deskstar 80 GB IDE drive for a few cents
less than that.

One advantage to the zip (over CDR) is that If I move a song to the
zip, it's still in a playable format. If I decide to remix after
archiving, I don't have to transfer the data again. I can just open it
up right there.

Yeah, but unless you want to overwrite your archived file, you need
space to store the revised version. It's much safer and saner to copy
your archive to your working medium, rework it, and then save the
reworked version (and archive it if you want to).



--
I'm really Mike Rivers )
However, until the spam goes away or Hell freezes over,
lots of IP addresses are blocked from this system. If
you e-mail me and it bounces, use your secret decoder ring
and reach me he double-m-eleven-double-zero at yahoo