Ancient Fujitsu M2654ST 2.1gb SCSI HDD

5May/170

Ancient Fujitsu M2654ST 2.1gb SCSI HDD

Found this at trash and treasure for AUD$20. It's huge! This is a serious server hard disk, built in February 1994. Configuring this thing requires some form of rocket-science degree as nothing is clearly labelled and there are connections for monitoring hardware as well? A little research found this document that has sparse information on this drive.

I installed this into my external SCSI enclosure and initially it just went click... click. I had the internal SCSI cable plugged in and the terminator was on the external SCSI housing's 'out' port. I'd given it up for trash (as opposed to treasure) and was about to print out the manual to check if the jumper settings would help.

Later on, I thought I'd try a separate power supply. It was an ATX power supply with an AT converter (see more information here) and the drive sat there clicking at a different rate to the previous attempt. This indicated that the ATX wasn't happy with zero load on the motherboard wires and a LOT of load on the drive wires.

I decided to put the drive back in the external SCSI enclosure, for prosperity and safe-keeping, but hadn't plugged in the SCSI data cable. Upon hitting the power switch the drive powered up!

Holy moly. Listen to that jet engine! Turns out that the drive doesn't like a data cable connected. Well, it loves it, but you need to provide it a signal to spin up once the cable is connected. Based on this, removing the terminator at the back of the SCSI enclosure saw the drive happily spin up with the 50-pin SCSI cable connected.

OK.. so... I plugged everything together properly and hooked it to my old Windows 98 SE machine. Well shit... it spun up and was detected fine. It actually holds the SCSI card BIOS screen for ransom whilst the drive spins up. Not a quick process. Can only imagine what server rooms used to sound like with these babies all firing up at once.

Once in windows.. everything reported a very empty drive... I'll grab some parition restoration utilities and give this a scan before I use it for it's full 2gb of storage...

GParted to the rescue

Here I was thinking that Windows would list any partitions... turns out that Windows doesn't understand all types of partition tables. See below for the results from GParted and then what happened when I plugged the drive into my my Power Mac 7220. It was even bootable!