Mac Pro 3.1 & Pionner Jukebox 720 DVD

[Merv'sG5]

Hello All,

I am trying to connect my Mac Pro 3.1 into a Pioneer Jukebox 720 DVD-CD stacker! (Model No DRM-7000) without any luck! It's connect via SCSI controller (ATTO ExpressPCI UL5D) the Mac Pro see's the jukebox in the About This Mac. But that's as far as I can get! Does anyone know what software I could download that will control the Jukebox or a SCSI utility that might take advantage of the jukebox? I don't know much about SCSI on a Macintosh very well! I hope someone can help!

Thanks in advance,
Merv Stent

 

[ScottishCaptain]

So in other words, it's working as intended.

Media changer devices (tape changers, magneto optical libraries, DVD libraries, etc) don't show up as anything meaningful. It's just a SCSI device that accepts commands which tell it how to move the media around (at which point the drive will mount the disk as usual on your desktop). You need software to actually do anything with it.

Now, if that particular unit is equipped with a DVD-RW drive, then you might be able to use it for backup with something line EMC Retrospect on Mac OS X (BackupExec or Arcserve would probably handle it on Windows). If it just has the factory DVD-ROM drives installed, then they're obviously not writers so you're going to be restricted to using it as a literal jukebox- in which case you could probably compile a utility like mtx (http://freecode.com/projects/mtx) and use that to issue commands to the robot to switch out media.

TLDR; these devices are not consumer oriented. Expect to get your hands dirty with the software if you want that thing to do something useful. I really hope you didn't expect it to just show up as some magical device that lets you access any of the DVDs at once- because that's not how media changers have ever worked.

-SC

 

[JesterJJZ]

Take the contents of everything on the discs inside and put them on a couple large hard drives and put that thing out on the curb...

 

[brand]

Take the contents of everything on the discs inside and put them on a couple large hard drives and put that thing out on the curb...

All of that would fit on a single 6TB hard drive. 6TB hard drives are currently going for about $300 for consumer and $600 for enterprise. Seems like a no brainer to reduce electricity cost, reduce space, and reduce complexity.

 

[ScottishCaptain]

Who cares?

It's a nice piece of hardware. It doesn't matter how much bigger disk drives may or may not be if op has a use for it. I'm still using a Powerfile R200 specifically because I don't trust disk drives for long term archival storage. Two companies I've done work for are still rocking magneto optical libraries, because they're reliable and built like tanks, plus the media is stable as hell if you're storing it in a decent environment.

-SC