Anyone got any gen at all on the Sankyo CP150B tape drive? Even a google search has turned up only two dead links: what I'm after is a data sheet for the drive or a jumper map.

Alternatively, anyone got anything on the Everex Excel 250 protable tape drive?

I believe Sankyo bought out Caliper which made the drives. And then finally Sankyo decided to leave the computer business.

The dipswitch settings for the CP150 *should* be this:

Off is 0, On is 1:

1 - SCSI ID LSB
2 - SCSI ID
3 - SCSI ID MSB
4 - Parity
5 - Drive Type LSB (Should be off)
6 - Drive Type (Should be off)
7 - Drive Type (Should be on)
8 - Drive Type MSB (Should be on)
9 - Hard Reset
10 - No Connection

[edit]
Forgot to give you the table of ID settings:
ID SW1 SW2 SW3
0 OFF OFF OFF
1 ON OFF OFF
2 OFF ON OFF
3 ON ON OFF
4 OFF OFF ON
5 ON OFF ON
6 OFF ON ON
7 ON ON ON

You should only need to change switches 1 - 4. Leave the others alone...
[/edit]

No guarantees though! So please check it before trying it out!

- Trevor

Thanks for this info - it got me started...

... BUT:

The drive is mounted in a portable case with a power supply. It has a 50-way D connector on the back: this feeds onto a PCB under the drive, which is obviously a controller for the drive unit, to which it is connected by another 50D. I can't see any jumpers/terminator packs that would hint at SCSI, on either the PCB or on the drive itself.

It is labelled as a CP150B - does that make a difference?

The CP150B should be the same thing...
Are there no dipswitches at all on this???

There used to be a Caliper CP150 drive at work which is why I had the dipswitch settings written down. The settings were off some newsgroup. The drive was thrown out a while back so I can't check it for you.

You should be able to make a vague guess as to if it's a SCSI connector or not by tracing the ground connections on the plug. Half the plug should be connected to ground. Is it a Centronics plug?

- Trevor

No, it's actually a board edge connector, like the SA connector for a floppy drive, only a lot bigger. I thought the same and I spent time tracing both the controller card and the drive: the one thing I try to look for first are the termination resistor packs - can't see any. Ooop. I am begining to wonder if this is really worth the effort. The skip looms.....

If it doesn't look like SCSI then it's probably a proprietory Everex controller interface. The capacity isn't too amazing though. Only 250MB! I've got more RAM then that

- Trevor