AppleCD 300

There are some other Apple external CD drive files here but the site is old and many of the links are dead. Instructions for the 300 should be similar to the 600:

http://home.earthlink.net/~strahm_s/manuals.html#imcs

Excellent. We still have a 600e unit on the shelf in our "Museum of Old Macs" (the spare bedroom!). We bought it for a Perfoma 475 about 1994 so we could run some educational programs for the kids. Seems like it cost over US$300 when we bought it--OUCH!

BTW, the Performa still works, running some oddball version of OS 7.1.

I have both the Apple 300e (2x read speed) and the 600e (4x read speed) units, which came with a pair of speakers. Both drives were manufactured by Matshita (Panasonic) and the SCSI enclosure was well-built. Allan mentioned his Performa 475, and I used the drives with an LC and an LC III. Years ago, I bought the 300e secondhand for about $100, so I escaped its higher initial retail price. I was given the 600e at the close of an Apple show/sale by a seller who wanted to lighten his load, before packing up his remaining unsold inventory. When I last used either LC, the capability to install software by CD (and not the repetitious insertion of floppy disks) seemed to bring those old Macs out of the stone age.

Hello,I just gotten of these AppleCD 300 cr-503-c W/1993 firmware SCSI 1 internal drive. I want to make it external. What can I use for an enclosure? Or can I use external cables like you would if you where going to use one of your old hard drives and use one of those 4, pin powe adapters that plug into the wall and plug your old hard drive into your computer using a USB cable. Instead of using the USB cable I would plug the IDC50 pin ribbon into a CN50 adapter. Then use a CN50 to DB25 pin into my SCSI port into my Synthesizer. Does anybody understand what I'm trying to say? It's confusing.

If not could some one steer me into the right direction to where I could get an Enclosure for the appleCD 300 CR-503-C? Thank you

Hi,

The best solution would probably be to find the exact enclosure used for the external version of the AppleCD 300. A number of other external SCSI devices (third-party CD-ROM drives, removable hard disk cartridge drives, tape drives) have enclosures that are similar, and possibly can be adapted. You may want to check an online auction site (the price level for SCSI devices is rather high today). Your idea about a separate power supply (a safe enclosed unit; with the correct cable connector, output voltages and power rating) and appropriate SCSI cables/connectors/terminator should work, too. An external case would normally use a SCSI ID switch, but that can often be solved by jumpers instead.

Jan

Keep in mind that those Matshita SCSI CD-ROM drives don't have a Termination Enable (TE) jumper position on the back of the drive. They have a "Term Pwr" (Termination Power) jumper, but that's a separate issue. In the old SCSI-based Macs, the SCSI ribbon cable was routed so that the hard drive was the last device connected to the cable and it had a jumper to enable termination of the bus. Your plan to use adapters to connect to the synthesizer must include a provision for termination of the bus. An external SCSI enclosure would typically have a pair of Centronics-50 connection ports on the back. I always plugged in an "active" terminator on the unused port, because it provided more stable performance compared to a passive terminator. When the transition in computer technology left SCSI devices behind in the dust, there were a lot of SCSI peripherals and accessories that surfaced on eBay, in thrift stores, etc. Now, the stuff is so old and scarce, that sellers charge a premium for the same items that sold for so much less 15 years ago.