The project idea is to take an old Apple 2 external floppy drive and convert that into some form of external storage drive.
Originally I thought of simply gutting the internals from the floppy drive and installing a portable USB3 drive inside and calling it a day.
That's when I remembered that I have 2 - Western Digital MyBook Thunderbolt Duo 4TB drives.
Each one has 2 Western Digital 2TB Green 5400 rpm HDD Drives inside and are Thunderbolt 1.
The thought then turned to if I can take the Thunderbolt Duo internals and fit it inside the Floppy drive case with 2 SSD drives.
You can then set this up as JBOD, RAID1 or RAID0. (This is why I had 2 of these previously, 1 external was RAID0 for speed and the 2nd was a backup in RAID1 for the first)
This started happening rather quickly and I was almost completely done with the first mockup before I started taking photos but if anyone is interested I plan on doing a 2nd and can document the process a little better in round 2.
The end result, hopefully, is to have a neat retro Apple DiskII Thunderbolt external RAID drive.
The WD Thunderbolt Duo controller board fit fairly easily inside the floppy drive case and I had a few aluminum spacers I used to mockup mounting points to set the board up a little as SSD's slots on both sides of the board. I can only use 3 of the 4 mounting holes to secure the board inside the drive but for as little as the board and SSD's weigh, it feels very secure.
I couldn't get the Thunderbolt jacks and power ports close enough to the rear of the case so at least with this v 1.0 I'm just drilling a hole large enough for a Thunderbolt cable another for the power cord through the rear of the floppy drive case and then place rubber grommets to protect the cables from the bare metal, make it look a little nicer and help hold and secure the cable from moving as much
Originally I thought of simply gutting the internals from the floppy drive and installing a portable USB3 drive inside and calling it a day.
That's when I remembered that I have 2 - Western Digital MyBook Thunderbolt Duo 4TB drives.
Each one has 2 Western Digital 2TB Green 5400 rpm HDD Drives inside and are Thunderbolt 1.
The thought then turned to if I can take the Thunderbolt Duo internals and fit it inside the Floppy drive case with 2 SSD drives.
You can then set this up as JBOD, RAID1 or RAID0. (This is why I had 2 of these previously, 1 external was RAID0 for speed and the 2nd was a backup in RAID1 for the first)
This started happening rather quickly and I was almost completely done with the first mockup before I started taking photos but if anyone is interested I plan on doing a 2nd and can document the process a little better in round 2.
The end result, hopefully, is to have a neat retro Apple DiskII Thunderbolt external RAID drive.
The WD Thunderbolt Duo controller board fit fairly easily inside the floppy drive case and I had a few aluminum spacers I used to mockup mounting points to set the board up a little as SSD's slots on both sides of the board. I can only use 3 of the 4 mounting holes to secure the board inside the drive but for as little as the board and SSD's weigh, it feels very secure.
I couldn't get the Thunderbolt jacks and power ports close enough to the rear of the case so at least with this v 1.0 I'm just drilling a hole large enough for a Thunderbolt cable another for the power cord through the rear of the floppy drive case and then place rubber grommets to protect the cables from the bare metal, make it look a little nicer and help hold and secure the cable from moving as much
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