saturn drive

[brourke228]

I have a saturn that I just got a hold of, though it has a dead cd-rom drive motor. So I'm just wondering if anyone knows where I can get a replacement drive or drive motor for a Sega Saturn for cheap? Or if I can pull the motor off some other device for use with it? If its more practical or cost-effective to just buy another saturn then I guess I'll do that.

[Gary_b]

i am not sure about using a motor from something else but you can probably find a broken Saturn on ebay for fairly cheap.

[Dingo]

If you want, you could always try to open the Saturn motor up and see if you can fix something. I did this with a dead dreamcast motor. One of the brushes in the motor got bent backwards somehow, I was able to 'carefully' open the motor and bend the one brush back to where it should be. It runs now, but I keep it as a spare.

I'm not too familirae with the inside of a Saturn, but if you can get to where you can read some numbers off the motor you could try to Google the part number to see the specs and find a suitable replacement.

Unfortunately, there could be reasons other than the motor being blown that the motor isn't spinning. First thing to do would be to hook that motor up to a suitable power source to see if it spins at all. If it does, your problems are probably elsewhere, and you should keep an eye out for another saturn. Worst to worst, the saturn you have now probably has some good parts in it. If you can't get it working, at least you have a parts machine.

[Dingo]

Ok. My Saturn was due for a cleaning so I -JUST- opened it up. Looks like the spindle motor is soldered right to the drive controller board. To get inside it would most likely require it being de-soldered.

But then again, to replace just the motor, you'd have to do that too.

Probably should just try to find an entire drive unit you can swap out if you are looking for the easy solution.

[brourke228]

Alright thanks for the responses. I'll probably end up buying another one because I don't want to have to de-solder the motor. This is a model 2 btw, I don't knkow if that makes a difference. I actually just bought this on ebay, but it was DOA and the seller refunded me. So its not like I'm at a loss here. What you were saying about your DC drive motor i thought was pretty interesting though. I actually have a Dreamcast that has a dead drive as well. The difference though is that on that the motor just spins erratically instead of not spinning at all. But of course the result is the same, can't read discs. Maybe I'll have a look at that one of these days.

[brourke228]

I ended up buying another saturn on ebay. I just got it today and hooray it works! I'm really surprised how good the sound quality is on this. I would even say it sounds better than Dreamcast.

I just took a photo of it. I got my Dreamcast wired through my netlink adapter so they can both use my pc-dc server. lol Although i know the saturn can only use it for the web browser.

[Favrenation]

Yeah Netlink uses direct phone connection. You need to have normal landline for it to work without lag. I heard that if you do since its direct dial, the game runs almost lagless on 14k.