User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Jul 09, 2018 7:15 pm

Behold - an exquisite (yes, that's right, exquisite) specimen of the SupraDrive with glorious Amiga branding.
IMG_6239.jpg
Behold the glory.

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She's not small, but she's got class.

I know. I know! I'm weird. But I've wanted one of these for a very long time and have been actively searching for over two years. And I have seen others, but I never got close. It was always after the fact. As soon as I learned of one, it was already gone. They always slipped through my grasp...

And I know a lot of you will look at this and raise and eyebrow and wonder if I've completely lost it, but hear me out.

FIrst, the aesthetics.

The SupraDrive (with Amiga branding) external hard disk is a near-perfect color. Realistically it's a little long unless you stack it on top of your 1000's case. If you use it with a 2000 it's just fine, of course.
IMG_6246.jpg
It could be used with the 500, 1000 or 2000 very easily. In the 1000's case, it would need to pop up top. Then, you could go really nuts and stack your second floppy drive on top of that potentially. The only "ding" I could possibly throw at it would be the border radii on the case corners, but I can live with that.

It also sports two LED lights, which - if you have the original SupraDrive install software and icons - they show in the icons on your Workbench desktop. Very cool!

And this particular specimen has an 99% perfect case, which is all metal by the way. It has 4 screws which hold the top of the metal housing to the rest of it. And check this out (geek alert!) the four screws have been painted to match the case!

I very carefully opened this bad girl up and she looks totally new inside.
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Who knows if it works? I hope to find out here soon.

Now, I don't know if she works. I hope she does, but I really have no idea. Looks like I am going to have to get some sort of SCSI adapter to use the original cable with my Microbotics SCSI port. Although I may try to hook it up to my 2000 first just to see if it will fire up over there (the machine where most everything works without much effort - 2000 FTW!).
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This machine can support more drives. Man I hope it all works! But if it doesn't? It'll be a sweet looking case for some sort of hard drive/scsi2sd. Hah! I'd much rather the mechanical still work, and if there's still data on it? Oh man that'll be exciting.

And lordy - if it doesn't work, the internal guts are so proprietary... But if it does? Holy crap. I could hook this bad boy up, and potentially daisy chain the Zip behind it for a whopping 120MB! Aw yeah.

Ancient classic "obsolete" hardware for the win. I just love it. :) And it makes my retro battlestations just look amazing!
Attachments
IMG_6247.jpg
Made in the USA, baby! ;)

Supra_1987-09.jpg

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Jul 09, 2018 7:57 pm

She's really noisy, but she makes all kinds of strange sound effects. Sounds like a P-51 Mustang shooting its machine guns. Hah!
She's probably gone bad. But she does sound pretty cool.

User avatar
Dynamic_Computing

Posted Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:05 pm

20 MB... Crazy thing is the pictures you took of your new toy, and certainly the video you took would not fit on it! Back in the day, though...
I have a couple hundred meg SCSI drive in my Amiga 3000, and it sounds like a jet engine taking off when it spins up. I can't believe it still works after 25 or so years.
Congrats on the great find!

User avatar
LambdaCalculus
New Jersey, USA

Posted Tue Jul 10, 2018 6:20 am

I'm reminded of a full height SCSI hard drive I have that I used to use with a Mac. 5.25" size, full height as mentioned, and housed in an external enclosure that's large enough and heavy enough to anchor a small sailboat at port. The drive sounds like a jet turbine spinning up when it powers on, and surprisingly, for a 25+ year old hard drive, it still works! I should pull it out and make an image of it soon, as it has a bunch of old art projects I did on old Macs still on it!

User avatar
A10001986
1986

Posted Tue Jul 10, 2018 6:47 am

(Literally:) Sounds ok to me. Those old drives needed to recalibrate now and then, so the noises at power on are pretty normal.

Also, the "internal guts" are a PSU, the hd itself and a small green board to reassign the wires coming from the controller to the drive and further to the external db25 scsi connector. Apart from that little green board there is nothing proprietary. This little green board could also help answer the question whether you can connect this to a SCSI controller of your choice or only the original Supra one; just follow the wires coming from the standard SCSI DB25 on the back and find out where they go on the centronics connector attached to the end of the thick cable. Pin assignments for both are easily found on the net.
Last edited by A10001986 on Tue Jul 10, 2018 7:09 am, edited 2 times in total.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jul 10, 2018 6:56 am

@A10001986 I'd love to find out, but the cable is completely bizarre. Until I can find the 4x4 I think this is going to be a large piece of retro artwork. Baffling they didn't use a regular SCSI connector, but nope. Ah well, the hunt continues! It's all about the hunt...

User avatar
A10001986
1986

Posted Tue Jul 10, 2018 7:07 am

You were to fast, I thought I get away with editing my message instead of writing another one. :)

User avatar
A10001986
1986

Posted Tue Jul 10, 2018 7:09 am

Ah I see, that's not a centronics but a db37 connector. Well then, it's either get a 4x4 anywhere or solder an adapter...

User avatar
A10001986
1986

Posted Tue Jul 10, 2018 7:11 am

It's not a 4x4 you need. The 4x4 has a standard db25 scsi connector, see http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/supra1000

If that connector is a db37, the required controller is a supra drive 500. http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/supra500

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jul 10, 2018 7:54 am

I was afraid you were going to say that. I haven't found a straight-up adapter anywhere, but do you think a cable like this might work? (crazy price, but hypothetically)





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