Enclosure Ideas for SCSI2SD

Well, it may come as no surprise, but I've had multiple SCSI HDD failures with my Classic Macs over the last months.  The internal drive in the Macintosh LC, a 40MB Quantum drive was a survivor, it functioned well for another couple of hundred hours after I acquired it on Craig's List last year, but it started reporting errors.  The failures of these old drives is an issue that people have known about and have been talking about for years, but it's still sad because that was the last internal mechanical drive I had from the early 90s.

I also bought an external Syquest 44 MB drive that was still functioning from that same lot, and now that has failed as well.  I was telling myself that since this was a more rugged version of the technology it should last longer, but that was not the case.

So, as I have done a couple of times before, I purchased a SCSI2SD to replace the defective drive(s).  As I started to work with the new device, I was having trouble getting it to work in the Macintosh LC's Internal Drive bay.  Lido was reporting a termination error, but the device has internal termination.  I know the SCSI2SD was working because I tested it in another 90's Macintosh.  After swapping cables and trying many different settings, I decided that it's likely that the internal SCSI bus on the Mac LC may have gotten damaged somehow.  Perhaps when I was using it to test other SCSI drives that I got in a lot from Craig's List.

Anyway, since I had the external SCSI enclosure available from the dead Syquest drive, I decided to transplant the SCSI2SD device inside of that enclosure.  It's certainly not the most compact solution, but it does maintain the period look, and since it's configured with 2 GB of storage I could load a very large portion of the 68K software library from the early 90s onto this machine!

Here's a picture I took partway through this project...

The computer boots up fine from the SCSI2SD inside of the enclosure when connected to the external SCSI port on SCSI ID 0.  I'm no longer using the External termination device, but I left it on there for looks.  I ran without the fan for a short time, but I do think the power supply generates enough heat, so I turned the fan back on.  I ran with the SD card inaccessible for a couple of weeks, then I decided that I'd be willing to trade the "clean" look on the front and sacrifice a blanking plate to have access to the SD card.  Now, the SCSI2SD looks like this...

As you can probably tell, I used a Dremel tool to create this opening, not a CNC machine, so it doesn't look perfect, but it is perfectly functional with both the SD card and the USB port accessible without taking the device apart.