Extending the life of a Genex GX8000

[David Spearritt]

It seems the Christmas hols are the only time for sorting out those esoteric problems for the year. Mine was trying to extend the life of an old GX8000 that had lost its MO drive.

I replaced the single MO drive with 2 x 18GB Seagate U160 SCSI Cheetahs. The problem for the Genex in talking to modern SCSI drives is that the SCSI controller in it is only 24bit so it can only see 2^23 times the sector size in disc capacity.

The default sector size for most modern SCSI drives is 512 bytes/sector which if left like this during a format sees the GX8000 only able to write to 2^23*512 bytes or approx 4GB which gives just over a paltry 1hr of record time for 8 tracks of 44/24 for each disc.

But for certain Seagate Cheetah drives, one can format them to 2048 bytes/sector, the ones that do this are the 18LP series (ST-318406LW, 18GB LVD). I acquired two drives off eBay, formatted them to 2048 bytes/sector block size using Bart's wonderful SCSI Tools utility (Bart's Scsitool) and stuck them in the GX8000. Now I should have just over 4.5 hrs of 8 track record time at 44/24 on each disc, due to the now addressable 17.2 GB in capacity. Beware that you cannot record right to the end of the disc, as you still reach the end of the addressable space before the disk runs out.

So, if you have an old GX8000 around or know of one going cheap, this is a way to get a respectable live multitrack machine useful again.

Update: 20070707, In practice I only seem to get just over 3 hrs of 8 track, 44/24 on each disk before it loses its file marker. Getting the disk format from Genex to understand why.