[RageX]

I haven't been engaged in this hobby much but I recently went back to dig through some old systems, see if there was anything I could sell.  I was working to install IRIX on a few old systems and it looks like all my external drives are dead.  I took one apart, it appears to have split a pinion gear, easy enough to fix.  The gears they're using are pretty wimpy and just pressed on a smooth shaft.  Not sure why this gear cracked in half, maybe a bad limit switch so it didn't detect went he tray is closed?  I have 2 other units that after they power on they open their tray and don't seem to ever register that the tray is shut, so they're always re-opening the tray.  Again, a limit switch issue?  Maybe the mechanism skipped a gear tooth so it isn't triggering the limit switch?  Or the switches just die?  The systems are all well stored, and undisturbed.

It sucks to go back to something and find out that it's like rotted... Don't get me started on the plastic, some of plastic skins have become like pasta.

Is anyone else seeing this with their drives?  Are optical drives just not that durable over 20-30 years?  Any tips for fixing this?  Any tips for the skins?  I def. need to try some retro-brite on some of these parts but I've heard it doesn't work well for colored plastic.

[weblacky]

The only drives I use for loading Irix are very old SUN CD cartridge-loading drives (have more than a few). I've not had one die yet, but the older 1X - 2X stuff was built like a damn tank! Those seem to just keep going. For tray-loaders...yeah stuff happens and the whole gear things is pretty crazy. I know some areas of the net are into recreating optical drive gears for certain appliances for that reason (let alone drive belts).

Many system skins were peanut brittle when got them less than 10 years after they were manufactured (Indigo2 and O2s come to mind...). Some collectors like myself don't ship systems for that very reason, I bought all mine locally over a 20+ year period. I would not risk an intact system today unless it was like an Octane or Fuel style case. Anything else, I'd have to consider. But the Skins cracking is nothing recent, it's the thing we warn newbies amount the most...don't underestimate HOW BAD the plastics have gotten! Also, my personal goal is to not even boot older systems I run across until I can do basic PSU measurements check to prevent first-power-on-damage. It's getting to that point.

As far as brightening, I've heard something similar, but I've never seen anyone try it with SGI cases, mostly because an intact skin is worth a lot, even if it's slightly discolored. No one wants to risk it. I guess you could try it on a cracked skin as an experiment just to see as a sample?

[JohnnyJohnny]

Is anyone else seeing this with their drives?  Are optical drives just not that durable over 20-30 years?  Any tips for fixing this?  Any tips for the skins?  I def. need to try some retro-brite on some of these parts but I've heard it doesn't work well for colored plastic.

I've had the same issues as well on a number of older SCSI drives, and it's always been due to a split plastic pinion gear. You can try gluing them back together with epoxy and some filing/sanding, but the better solution is to replace them with metal gears.

[Raion]

I use an HP slot loading DVD drive when I need to read CDs. Works fine.

[mgtremaine]

Yep the CD drive in the o2 broke last year in the same way. I have an external SUN cdroma also, but it's storage, that'll be the last of my SCSI cd roms. If I can repair the gear that'd be great but I doubt I'll try replace the drive. Easier to net install these days. (At some point the CD's themselves will start bit rotting away.. sad face )

-Mike

[RageX]

...from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then hour by hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale...

Well looks like I have some work to do. This hobby is becoming more like museum preservation work 😂

I swapped in some spare drives into the enclosures that failed and one worked, one displayed the same forever open tray issue. Got another drive from eBay delivered today, we'll see. I'll see if I can get my hands on a slot loading drive and maybe standardize on that. All my drives currently are from Toshiba.

This also gives me a reason to try out the IRIX network install docker container. In all this time I've never learned how to do a network install.

[weblacky]

Not to change the topic, that's why I've been unapologetic about pushing restoration/repair scenario threads. This hobby HAS CHANGED (for me), I need to be able to repair what I can. I'm less worried about optical media because SCSI DVD drives are still very plentiful and many had 512 Block modes (don't know how many can load Irix). But Power supplies are #1 on my learning list, followed by mainboard checking (confirmation before usage/power-on via the PSU headers). I will take a few years, but yeah...our collections have started to age far enough where the the fact that the components are derated and very high-quality when manufactured...isn't saving us anymore from the ravages of age.

However this isn't an unprecedented topic (many have travelled it before with other systems), just not really with SGIs. For mainboards, SGI used A LOT of tants with only a few electrolytics...compared to others. So I think Mainboards will actually survive another 10 years before we start seeing mass-failures. And I'd like to simply swap, part for part, on those electrolytics before that happens for mainboards (they really have so few compared to PC mainboards of the same power and vintage).

I've not had optical failures yet though for the tray DVD SCSI drives I have (at least that I know of).

I will say that from what I've learned so far, after rebuilds, we'll need to issue guidelines to keep them stable and long lived. Seems there several electrical/chemical/physical issues that happen to PC parts when left sitting in a single position for storage. Bearings flatten, lubricants travel and collect, passives age and die out faster when simply stored and not utilized regularly. I think the biggest will be the maintain rebuilt PSU life and prevent bearing warp...the systems will need to be booted at least every 2 months for a total of two hours to adhered to Capacitor maintenance and reforming guideline of storage and to spin the bearing and lubricate all HDDs and optical drives. So, at least for me, my collection will have to be change drastically to allow for a hooked up KVM and switched min-power strips to allow the easy turn on and booting. I'd obviously not keep power on for standby. But if you go a year or more without booting a system, it can actually lead to a faster aging of certain cap chemistries. Though you'd not likely notice it in these designs for around 10 years if all parts were new. But at these stages you're now seeing people who claimed their systems worked two years ago or less, and now they are dead. That's the margin of what's left.

Sorry to get off the topic of optical drives, but it's related and an important point.

Also one last point, in the last month I've seen an explosion of mainboard and system parts on eBay but NOT power supplies. I draw a very scary conclusion from this...people are trying to boot old SGIs, finding them dead, and parting them OUT and throwing away the non-working parts. Mainboards are still OK, but if everyone throws away PSUs and cases...complete systems will start becoming very scarce...and that's a bad thing. So I firmly believe that right now PSU failures are rapidly being found/escalating. If that it's corrected within about 2-3 years...I figure that most recyclers and warehousers will start dumping system parts on the market after gutting complete systems and won't be selling the non-working bits for us to fix...they just end up as trash...making any new collector wishes to assemble a complete and working SGI that much more impossible.