Hi All,
As a matter of academic curiosity I was wondering if anyone has more information on the 40MB accelerator drives which were offered for early OD only/network cubes. Here is what I have managed to piece together:
On October, 17, 1989, NeXT announced that the drives would be shipping in new network user systems, with a ship date of Nov. 1. The drives would also be available as a free upgrade for earlier systems if you contacted NeXT. The drive in question is a Quantum 40s ProDrive 40mb. These are 3.5" drives which were also used in Apple systems at the time, and were evidently not well received in the Apple world do to a high failure rate. By initializing the disk in disk builder with a drive name of "swapdisk" Nextstep will automatically use the disk for the swap file. Apparently the OD only systems were much more responsive with this configuration. The swap disk should be SCSI ID 6.
So this brings me to my questions.
1) For early cubes with the hard disk option, was the OS shipped from the factory on the Hard Drive or was it always on the OD and up to the user to transfer it?
2) What is the earliest Nextstep version to support a swapdisk out of the box? I'm assuming before official support one could just remap the swap file to it. I believe this put the initial offering in the NS V1.0 time frame?
3) Does anyone have the 3.5" to 5.25" adapter that would have been necessary to mount one of these into a cube? Was there anything special about it? Is there anything special about the drive itself in so far as labeling?
I'm sure most of these systems were upgraded to full hard disks or thrown away after the OD died. I also find it interesting that NeXT was sending out free hard disks to early adopters. Even the 40MB had to be pretty expensive to do that with.
Thanks,
Brian