Not wanting too many disks lying around his Apple II battlestation, [NeXT] started looking into hard drive solutions. There is the old-time solution – a ProFile hard drive initially designed for the Apple /// and Lisa, but those are rare as hen’s teeth, and just as expensive as newer Compact Flash adapters. [NeXT] had another option – SCSI, with an adapter card, but most of the SCSI devices of the era didn’t fit in with the cool ‘stackable’ aesthetic of AII peripherals.
With a bit of Bondo and some paint, [NeXT] modded an old dual disk drive into a retro-looking hard drive perfect for storing and running hundreds of old games.
[NeXT] began his build by taking an old Apple DuoDisk (the two-disk drive seen above) and Bondoing over the holes in the front. A drive activity light was added above the Apple logo, and the old drives saved for another day. Inside the new enclosure, an old 40MB hard drive, tested on a Macintosh SE/30, was installed along with a small power supply for the drive. With a few custom SCSI cables, the drive will be ready for it’s grand debut. We think it looks awesome just sitting there, and is sure to be the pride of [NeXT]’s collection.
Really nice looking but why not the CF adapter? Was it the desire to keep with the tech of the day more or less?
Your answer is your question.
The Apple DuoDisk is also a rare find. This is a rather big sacrifice, IMO.
Not nearly as rare as the ProFile drives, if memory serves. I used to have 2 of ’em when I had an A][ collection. Now I just have the one //c as it’s the smallest :)
DuoDisks aren’t horribly common but they aren’t explicitly rare, otherwise I would of waited for a dead one to come my way and do the job with that one instead.
I made sure though that any reusable parts were given new homes and the internal drive assembly went to someone else who didn’t overly care about his Apple having an enclosureless DuoDisk drive.
Plus, it’s not like it was in the greatest shape to begin with.
Very nice. I approve.
How rare are these parts? I’ll have to go dig in my Apple II closet since I think I have an Apple hard drive, but I know I have several Duo drives. One of my Apple IIe’s has a 5x processor boost card in it, which makes playing “Wings of Fury” impossible it is so fast. Very nice job, looks great!
I think the only really rare part here is the SCSI card. As far as the duodisk, they’re not really common, but I wouldn’t feel bad about sacrificing one. Especially for something this cool.
Actually the first commercially available hard drive for the Apple II was the Corvus. It came in both 8″ and 5.25″ versions. I’ve still got an 8″ hard drive here, weighs about 50 lbs. and if I remember right was about 10Mbytes of storage. Really wide ribbon cable to a proprietary interface card. It was also available in a network version where several of the ribbon cables would plug into the multiplexer box.
I see NeXT and i see the old company. Confusing.
Well done!