PT III SCSI hard drive and disk I/O help!!!

[jammanis]

hi all

im new to the group so any help would be appriciated. i recently purchased a pro tools III system and i have been putting the whole thing back together to make it work. i originally had just the disk I/O and DSP farm card. i got the 882 and appropriate cable, now i needed the hard drives. i went onto ebay and bought 2 avid is9 hard drives. i figured since it is avid, it should work. these drives appear to be 68pin drives. (i think..... im new to this) and on the disk I/O card there are 2 jacks. a square looking one with a bunch of pins (also on DSP farm card) and this small looking jack. i assume the square one is for the interface and the other is for the hard drive. i got some cables from a friend who has a mix 24 system. he gave me what looks like an old scsi cable, and some 68 pin to some small plug cable that i thought would fit the disk I/O. he said it would fit a mix card to the hard drive. but it was too big for the small jack on the disk I/O....soo...here are my questions:

will the avid is9 drives work with my system. they are 68pin . i think PT III is on 50pin??

what cable do i need to make this work?-prefer avid model number so i can find it.

will an adaptor work if i need one?

what is the other port on the DSP farm card for?

or do i have to ditch these drives and the cables (sigh) and buy an older drive or something??

help!!!!!

joe

[Stylin' Audio]

Since nobody else has given a definitive answer I thought I would cast a ray of sushine your way and say that I am sure I used a few Avid drives in combination with others and there were no problems. Adapters for the various SCSI ports seemed to work fine. This is going back in the old brain box a little ways though, so forgive me if I am cloudy here.

I don't remember what the various connection ports on the PT III cards are for, sorry. Have you tried a real thorough look around the Answerbase section of the site?

Good luck!

[soundboy35]

The small connection on the Disk I/O card is to connect your external hard drive, which as I remember is a
SCSI 50pin Centronics connection. The other connection is for the interface; 882, etc. The Farm card should connect
directly to a second interface. As far as the 68pin drives, you can try an adaptor from 50 pin to 68, but I don't remember
if that was the work-around. Otherwise, you have to use the Centronics.

Anybody else??


Steve

[digidesigner]

You need to mount your HD-s in an external HD case with big 50 pin connector. Then you need an adapter (active) inside that box to connect your 68 pin HD to the 50 pin ribbon cable of that external box. Then you need a special PT III disk IO-to-external box SCSI cable that was originally included with disk IO cards.
The port on DSP card is for another interface. You can have 16 inputs and outputs with your system if you had two interfaces.
You cannot use the SCSI cables you have but you could use the drives I believe, even tough PTIII is rather picky about the drives. I have bought some in hope they work just to find out they don't. Search the DUC, there are some topics about this buried down here somewhere!
Good luck!

[jammanis]

hi
thanks for the posts everyone. all your help is very much appriciated. now i tracked down the cable that attaches to the disk I/O to the drives but its 50pin scsi. and the drive that i have is already mounted in an external case. its an avid is9. both the hard drive (inside the is9 case) and the port on the back of the extrnal avid is9 drive is 68 pin. so do i need an internal adaptor (for inside the external drive) or should i use an external one that would go from disk i/o to cable to adaptor to hard drive. would this cause any problems? since there is a difference in pins? i thought i read somewhere that it may cause problems. maybe im wrong.

any more info would be a great help

thanks
joe

[digidesigner]

hi
thanks for the posts everyone. all your help is very much appriciated. now i tracked down the cable that attaches to the disk I/O to the drives but its 50pin scsi. and the drive that i have is already mounted in an external case. its an avid is9. both the hard drive (inside the is9 case) and the port on the back of the extrnal avid is9 drive is 68 pin. so do i need an internal adaptor (for inside the external drive) or should i use an external one that would go from disk i/o to cable to adaptor to hard drive. would this cause any problems? since there is a difference in pins? i thought i read somewhere that it may cause problems. maybe im wrong.

any more info would be a great help

thanks
joe

in case you do find an external adaptor try it before you buy it. I must say I have not seen an external adaptor like that but there are many things that I have not seen but they still do exist

here is a copy-paste form comptability section of this site in case you have not found it:

Pro Tools III for Macintosh Systems — Additional SCSI Requirements

Pro Tools III Disk I/O: Wide drives require cable adapter, such as Avid PN 0070-00469-01 (12" 50-pin female Centronics to 68-pin male high-density)
Pro Tools III Disk I/O: Some 3rd Generation LVD DigiDrives and LVD hard drives from other storage manufacturers will not mount when connected to a Pro Tools III Disk I/O. Digidesign has confirmed that 3rd Generation LVD DigiDrives containing mechanism model numbers beginning with "ST" will function correctly. DigiDrives with mechanism model numbers beginning with "D" will NOT function correctly. The DigiDrive's mechanism model number can be viewed during initialization within your drive formatting software. Note that the new 4th Generation Ultra160/LVD DigiDrives do not have this incompatibility and are qualified to work with Pro Tools III Disk I/Os.
Pro Tools III is limited to 16 tracks, 16-bit, 48KHz with 1 Disk I/O. 32 tracks requires a second Disk I/O, 48 tracks a third Disk I/O.
Each Pro Tools III Disk I/O must have a hard drive connected with a maximum 16 tracks on each drive.


also check this list:
http://pro.miroc.co.jp/digidesign/te...ivelist43.html
or
http://www.digidesign.com/support/compat/qualdrives.pdf

good luck!