My geeky happiness

Corbett | September 4, 2004 3:58 AM

Some people get happiness from money, or sexual conquest, or big face, or shopping, or travel.

My happiness arrived yesterday in the form of a 6 year old used Seagate SCSI hard drive.

Say what?

Yes, a used SCSI HDD made me hilariously happy. Here's why...

I have an old Akai DR16 hard disk recorder which I used for prepro stuff for my old pop group Beauty4. The girls would practice on it, I'd use it for demos, it was a handy piece of heavy gear which was bullet proof.

It'd been sitting around in a closet for many years, until I started making bootlegs for the bands that play at the Living Room. Then it came in very handy again. 16 tracks, incredibly clean A/D convertors, and best of all it works like a cassette deck. Press a button, record. Much better than screwing around with a computer.

It had a state of the art 1996 SCSI hard drive in it. The biggest, fastest, most expensive drive you could get at the time. A whopping 2GB! Whoa.

This provided about 7 hours of single track recording. But when you get 3 vocals, 2 guitars, a bass, and some stereo overheads, you're using 8 tracks, and suddenly your 7 hours has been whittled down to 52 minutes. 52 minutes is not enough to record a two hour set.

Simple solution. [I thought.] I can just pop in a new hard drive. But nooo, things in geeky pro audio land are never that simple.

The current firmware only recognized 2GB, and I needed to "upgrade" to version 2.32. After several emails and long distance calls, I tracked down the needed chip in Los Angeles, a little .5 oz 20-legged eprom thingy, which cost nothing to make, $100 to buy, and another $50 to send to Taiwan via DHL, since that was the only way they'd send it. I installed it and of course it didn't work. Another three weeks later, and a bunch of phone calls, I finally got something sent to me which worked when installed in my recorder.

Finally, now the machine reads unlimited HD space. Whoopee.
I have more hard disks sitting around you can shake a stick at, so I dig out a brand new super cool looking fastest thing on the block IBM SCSI drive, and am horrified to find that new SCSI drives have 68 pin connectors while the older ones have 50. [I foolishly conclude that] I just need "to find the right cable down at the computer market..."

After visiting every shop in the market, and digging though boxes of crap and wires and circuit boards and led lights, I finally come back with a flimsy plastic adaptor and a used 68 pin cable I begged off a salesman.

I get it all installed again, and voila... it doesn't work. Of course.

Another few days of 2am calls to USA support, and finally one nice engineer says, "Well, doh, of course, you're not using the Seagate STxxxxxLW 7200rpm SCSI drive."

So the next day I go out Seagate STxxxxLW SCSI hunting in the Taipei computer markets. There's got to be one sitting around somewhere. Hours of blank stares later, I return exhausted, miffed, insulted, and thoroughly aggravated. It's impossible to get anything but the fastest latest greatest thing in Taiwan.

My next plan of attack then is....Ebay.

A few weeks trolling on Ebay leads nowhere. There're plenty of STxxxxxW's and STxxxxxLC's and a zillion other combinations, but not the elusive LW running at 7200 RPMs, which, doh, it what it takes to make this thing work.

Another few weeks pass, and oh my god, there it is on Ebay, and it's in Taiwan.
And there's a phone number. I call, yes, the numbers match, a price is negotiated, and rather than wait for it to be sent to me, I drive out to Shijr [the end of the world when you live where I do] to meet the guy for the "deal."

The conversation evolves like this:

Me: "I'm across the street from your building. Why don't you come down now."
Him: "Where are you now?"
Me: "I'm across the street from your building."
Him: "So you are here?"
Me: "Yes, across the street from you now, in a car, sitting here, on the phone with you, as we had discussed, while I look at your building, which is across the street. Now. Yes."
Him: "So where do you want to meet?"
Me: "Oh Jesus Christ, just come downstairs and meet me."
Him: "Where?"
Me: "Aaarrgh. Just meet me in front of the Starbucks then. I'll be sitting there."
Him: "Where?"
Me: "In front of the goddamned stupid fucking Starbucks in your building, on the first floor, in a chair sitting down, waiting for you."

I wait, he arrives, the transaction is made, and in my hands is the little piece of hardware that will solve all my never ending audio problems.

I rush back, tear the Akai apart, install my masterpiece, and voila...it doesn't work.

Some A/B testing and I isolate the problem to invalid jumper settings. There are 8 jumpers, and I take a look at the old drive, which also has 8, so I [naturally] assume that emulating the way the jumpers are set up on the old disk will work on the new disk. Never naturally assume. 2 jumper thingies, 8 places to put them. Statistically that comes out to like 28 different combinations. You can imagine what happened next.

Yes! 20+ combinations later, it starts up, humming, working beautifully, giving me 56 glorious hours of recording time.

I'm hilariously happy in a geeky sort of way.

Category: Ramble

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