wierd_w wrote on 2025-04-01, 12:01:

Odd that the flopptical drives can only be IDs 1, 2, and 4. Termination type is a nice feature though. FAR too many narrow scsi devices handle that exclusively with a resistor pack.

On the SCSI enclosure there is a dial to select the desired ID.
With the dial you can go from 0 to 9, in the manual 0 and 7 are to be avoided because they belong to "system".

Probably combinations allow different IDs. This is my idea but could be dead wrong.
The txt file gives combos for jumpers for internal units, but the scsi dongle in the enclosure could be using settings selected via a different method, as the manual doesn't state any limit beside 0 and 7.

Edit:

Cloudschatze wrote on 2025-04-01, 12:44:

wierd_w wrote on 2025-04-01, 12:01:

Odd that the flopptical drives can only be IDs 1, 2, and 4.

The document could have explained this better, but the three ID jumpers are additive, providing an 0 - 7 range. All open = ID 0, all closed = ID 7, etc.

Makes sense now 😀
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I'll be starting a repair thread for this unit.
Not only 1 res and 1 cap are dead but also a big chip just close (see pic)

Hello Everyone,

I would like to make a small update on my part. I obtained some disks at a reasonable price and have been able to successfully read and write using the PLI drivers on my Mac and in DOS and Windows. I also obtained a loose internal unit likely from an SGI system and it worked without any issues with the drivers as well. I figured out how to get it working on DOS as my issue turned out to be with the SCSI adapter. I have some cheap Advansys cards I've had forever and none of them worked properly on dos with Insite drives. I recently got an adaptec pci adapter and that solved the issue. I also tested it on WindowsXP and it successfully identified the drive. Had a similar issue some have had where the drive was read only. I found a funny work around where if I loaded MacOS using BaslilskII loading the pli driver would send the proper unlock signal to the drive and it was then writable in Windows until the computer rebooted.

I still have one I used in the mid 90's and still have a dozen disk or so. I used a Buslogic BT-932 and it's bios was floptical aware. That bios is not the flashpoint RAID bios and available to flash for the whole family as I remember, 930,932,950,952. The last time I fired up that box it was having a hard time with many disc of all capacities. I didn't play with it long, boxed and kept it. It's an Abit IT5H with 3 2 channel cards, a 5 disc 80 pin cage and the floptical. As I left it in about 98 or so.