WTB: 50 pin SCSI drive, serial card

[oblivion]

looking for a working 50 pin SCSI hard drive. doesn't need to be fancy. something 500MB or bigger but I'd be more then happy with 504mb-1GB

also looking for 16 bit ISA serial port cards or multi/IO cards for a few vintage 386 and 286 projects (they don't need to have IDE controllers)

 

[g4ugm]

50-pin SCSI drives less than 1GB are hard to come by as there are quite a few systems that will only work with such drives. I have a few 2GB but as I am in the UK shipping to Arizona would be expensive. You might consider buying one of these:-

http://shop.codesrc.com/

not cheap , but usefull...

 

[Chuckster_in_Jax]

50-pin SCSI drives less than 1GB are hard to come by as there are quite a few systems that will only work with such drives. I have a few 2GB but as I am in the UK shipping to Arizona would be expensive. You might consider buying one of these:-

http://shop.codesrc.com/

not cheap , but usefull...

The website shows "Out of Stock"

There should be other sources for similar boards though.

 

[gslick]

50-pin SCSI drives less than 1GB are hard to come by as there are quite a few systems that will only work with such drives.

I have had decent luck so far using 68-pin SCSI drives with a 50-pin - 68-pin adapter, along with using sg_format from the Win32 sg3_utils executables from http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html to soft resize drives larger than 1GB down to exactly 1GB for older 50-pin SCSI systems that do not support drives larger than 1GB.

I picked up 20-30 IBM 9GB 68-pin SCSI drives fairly cheap a while ago that I use for this purpose, and bought a couple of cartons of 50-pin - 68-pin adapters too.

 

[oblivion]

I have had decent luck so far using 68-pin SCSI drives with a 50-pin - 68-pin adapter, along with using sg_format from the Win32 sg3_utils executables from http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html to soft resize drives larger than 1GB down to exactly 1GB for older 50-pin SCSI systems that do not support drives larger than 1GB.

I picked up 20-30 IBM 9GB 68-pin SCSI drives fairly cheap a while ago that I use for this purpose, and bought a couple of cartons of 50-pin - 68-pin adapters too.

that's a good idea, I have a few larger 68 pin drives here. Wouldn't a larger drive just be seen as the largest the bios supports? Didn't know you needed special software.

 

[mbbrutman]

SCSI is really good about backwards compatibility and about making the full capacity of the drives available to the machine. (Within reason.) Long before BIOSes started playing games with CHS to make larger IDE drives map their CHS correctly SCSI was mapping LBAs (Logical Block Addresses) to CHS in a way to make as much of the drive available as possible.

This of course depends on the SCSI card. A card with a BIOS that can boot a drive must offer LBA to CHS translation.

(I've used many SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 drives on primitive systems like a PCjr with a parallel-port to SCSI adapter.)


Mike

 

[Chuck(G)]

3.5" or 5.25"? There should still be a bunch of the latter kicking around--big power-hungry creatures. I've got some 3.5" SCA drives; all you need is the adapter to 50-pin, which should be pretty easy to find.

Also, don't overlook using older Apple SCSI drives, such as used on early Performas.

 

[oblivion]

3.5" or 5.25"? There should still be a bunch of the latter kicking around--big power-hungry creatures. I've got some 3.5" SCA drives; all you need is the adapter to 50-pin, which should be pretty easy to find.

Also, don't overlook using older Apple SCSI drives, such as used on early Performas.

3.5'' would be ideal. funny you should say that about the apple drives because the IDE I have in there is actually an old apple IDE drive from a destroyed 5200CD. I do have an old SCSI drive from apple but its a tiny 40MB drive, to small for my purposes. would you say SCSI benifits on an older system like a 286 more then say a 486 because of less cpu power?

 

[g4ugm]

I have had decent luck so far using 68-pin SCSI drives with a 50-pin - 68-pin adapter, along with using sg_format from the Win32 sg3_utils executables from http://sg.danny.cz/sg/sg3_utils.html to soft resize drives larger than 1GB down to exactly 1GB for older 50-pin SCSI systems that do not support drives larger than 1GB.

I picked up 20-30 IBM 9GB 68-pin SCSI drives fairly cheap a while ago that I use for this purpose, and bought a couple of cartons of 50-pin - 68-pin adapters too.

I have a few assorted 3gb and 4gb drives. Perhaps sg_format will be useful with those, thanks

 

[Chuck(G)]

3.5'' would be ideal. funny you should say that about the apple drives because the IDE I have in there is actually an old apple IDE drive from a destroyed 5200CD. I do have an old SCSI drive from apple but its a tiny 40MB drive, to small for my purposes. would you say SCSI benifits on an older system like a 286 more then say a 486 because of less cpu power?

I've got an old Performa 6200 with a 250MB SCSI in it, so Apple definitely did make larger drives.

The original reason for SCSI was that it was higher performance than MFM and could offer much higher capacities (it didn't rely on the BIOS or limitations of CHS addressing). A good caching controller could produce some really good transfer speeds--at one time I had a controller with 10MB worth of SIMMs on it.

After IDE ultra-DMA and LBA addressing and RAID controllers came out, the advantages of SCSI became inconsequential.

I'm not sure if this answers your question, however.

 

[oblivion]

I've got an old Performa 6200 with a 250MB SCSI in it, so Apple definitely did make larger drives.

The original reason for SCSI was that it was higher performance than MFM and could offer much higher capacities (it didn't rely on the BIOS or limitations of CHS addressing). A good caching controller could produce some really good transfer speeds--at one time I had a controller with 10MB worth of SIMMs on it.

After IDE ultra-DMA and LBA addressing and RAID controllers came out, the advantages of SCSI became inconsequential.

I'm not sure if this answers your question, however.

sort of, would you in general recommend SCSI (if cost isn't an issue) over IDE where IDE is available for say 486 systems and slower running DOS? I've probably asked this question in one form or another previously but I generally have been using SCSI in pretty much all my 486 machines and slower. I guess I'm asking would just using a more modem IDE device on a 16 bit ISA ide controller give me about the same performance as a SCSI drive on a 16 bit SCSI controller on a 286. its a little confusing cause some resources I read say that SCSI takes some burden off the CPU and helps performance, others say the difference is to small to matter. I assumed that when you get to faster CPU's like a Pentium that there isn't much of a difference but I was thinking on a slower CPU like a 8088 or a 286 that SCSI performance would be noticeably better.

SCSI cards with cache memory seem to be pretty rare or expensive. I have only one such card but unfortunately its PCI and there appears to only be drivers for it for Windows NT and 2000

 

[bigblock]

If anyone has any 2gb 50pin scsi drives, I'd be looking for one as well. Seagate or Quantum would be nice!