Syquest/Iomega removable cartridge drive interfaces of early 80's

[Mike van Bokhoven]

>> > Am I correct in remembering that the Syquests of that time used the
>> > 34/20 pin MFM-hard-drive "ST506" interface?
>>    Yes, this is correct.  I have a small Syquest removable hard drive
>> here that I used for just long enough to figure out that it was
>> unreliable as all hell.  I last powered it up in about 1990 or so.
>> It has a standard ST506 interface.
> Unreliable?  Hmm.

My father worked at a typesetting firm in the late 80s and early through mid 
90s, they used Syquest 44MB cartridge drives. Yes, they were horribly 
unreliable. They'd probably be OK for home use, but it was a fairly normal 
occurrence to call the service agent in because the drive had stopped 
working, or they couldn't retrieve data from a cartridge. On several 
occasions, the service agent would fiddle with the drive, and replace the 
cartridge, causing the drive to make a very loud scraping, squawking sound, 
which turned out to be something ripping chunks of coating off the cartridge 
platters. The agent seemed to use whichever cartridge was closest to hand 
for testing; on a couple of occasions, he destroyed cartridges that 
contained vital client data.

Most of this info is second-hand, but my father would often come home with 
stories of the day's Syquest or Mac-related disasters.

Mike.