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We need something better than cards for retro PC HD Drive Replacement

One of my clones has the original XT-IDE, it's the one i modded for the "Chuck Mod" and fitted a CF adapter to it. It still uses Hargel's BIOS.
 
I too would like to see better IDE solutions. Although I have a stock of IDE drives and CF cards that seem to work fine it would be nice if we had a ZuluIDE that works exactly like ZuluSCSI or BlueSCSI except IDE interface. Image files of any size and no compatibility issues regardless of size.
 
Zippy Zapp said:
I too would like to see better IDE solutions. Although I have a stock of IDE drives and CF cards that seem to work fine it would be nice if we had a ZuluIDE that works exactly like ZuluSCSI or BlueSCSI except IDE interface. Image files of any size and no compatibility issues regardless of size.
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I think they are working on one. At least the guys at the table selling them at VCF SoCal told me they were.
 
Oh You are right. Looks like there is already a landing page for it here: ZuluIDE. Not sure what they can do about transfer speed though. Early IDE should be no problem with the hardware they use as the transfer speeds were pretty slow but later Ultra ATA 33-133 were quite a speed improvement so not sure the current microcontroller could handle those speeds. At any rate, that would be a great project. It is so nice being able to just create simple image files on a SD card and have it work.

Edit: It looks like it is more of a CD-ROM and ZIP emulator ATAPI vs general IDE. Hopefully as it progresses they make it usable as an IDE HD emulator. I think I will contact them about the Beta.
 
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Zippy Zapp said:
Oh You are right. Looks like there is already a landing page for it here: ZuluIDE. Not sure what they can do about transfer speed though. Early IDE should be no problem with the hardware they use as the transfer speeds were pretty slow but later Ultra ATA 33-133 were quite a speed improvement so not sure the current microcontroller could handle those speeds. At any rate, that would be a great project. It is so nice being able to just create simple image files on a SD card and have it work.
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Site looks unfinished and I haven't heard anything from Rabbithole on it yet. I wonder what's up there, just unfinished?
 
Has zuluscsi gotten better? I bought the first version and found is an problematic as the bluescsi. Shame they wont make the scsi2sd as those things worked flawlessly.
 
3lectr1c said:
Site looks unfinished and I haven't heard anything from Rabbithole on it yet. I wonder what's up there, just unfinished?
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Yes I noticed that too. I am not sure the status. I have sent them an email and awaiting a response.

VERAULT said:
Has zuluscsi gotten better? I bought the first version and found is an problematic as the bluescsi. Shame they wont make the scsi2sd as those things worked flawlessly.
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What kind of problems? I found ZuluSCSI to be superior to SCSI2SD in every way. Of course we all have different use cases. Mine has been with classic Macs and Amiga. I like them so much better that I will probably sell all of my SCS2SD cards as I have a few and they have all been replaced by either home assembled BlueSCSI v1 or ZuluSCSI. The RP2040 versions have even faster transfer speeds than the SCSI2SD V6 from what I can tell.
 
Quite the opposite for me freezing crashing just unreliable.. i tried them when scsi2sds dried up. Macintosh lcs and mac color classics... Just to unreliable to use so i sold them. I still have a bunch of bluescsi model 1 c's but ijust dont trust them enough to use them. Maybe the firmware is better now idunno. I just didnt have the patience to keep trying. Scsi2sd just dropped in and worked. Those did not. And tranfer rates mean nothing when the device doesnt work.. i dont care what the microcontroller is. I just want it to work. If you have scsi2sd to sell pm me. Im interested. Most of mine were scsi2sd ver 5.1 They suited my needs just fine and i liked how they had headers for 25 pin connectors. I feel terrible i sold them all. Though they would make more.
 
Oh bummer. I'll let you know if/when I do. They are packed in a box right now due to recently moving. As for BlueSCSI and ZuluSCSI I guess it wouldn't hurt to try the current firmwares. Yeah for those computers it should be a no brainer. And yes transfer rate is meaningless if it crashes. I do know that the early versions were a little more particular about the SD card being used. I seem to have plenty that work but that is not the case with everybody.
 
@VERAULT bluescsi v1 and v2 are both very good. And, I've had good luck with the zuluscsi rp2040, as well. I'm not sure exactly what version of firmware that you were running, but I have bought, built, and been given lots of slightly different boards, and they all work well.

- Alex
 
Does anyone really have a problem with the speed of CF to IDE adapters? I haven't benchmarked it but in terms of real-world performance mine seems faster than any spinning IDE or SATA disk I ever used.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Does anyone really have a problem with the speed of CF to IDE adapters? I haven't benchmarked it but in terms of real-world performance mine seems faster than any spinning IDE or SATA disk I ever used.
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FWIW, the "adapter" for this situation is literally just wires. The speed of the CF's own built in "True IDE" mode is what you're seeing. If you're talking about IDE to SD adapters then, yes, there's an active bridge chip doing the conversion that could *hypothetically* be the limiting factor if you had a really fast SD card, but... realistically, it's pretty ridiculous anyone would worry about performance with of either of these solutions with computers that most people would call "retro". In my experience playing with it in an 800mhz Cyrix C3-based system one of those IDE to SD adapters ran just as fast in terms of data transfer rate as I remember 2000-ish-era PATA disks running at, and the access time was superior. Maybe it'd bog down under heavy random write traffic in a system that fast, that's a weakness you'll run into with CF and SD (both were originally designed for tasks more along the lines of storing digital photos, IE, single-threaded bulk file writes, not random access), but for casual use they're fine, just fine.

Zippy Zapp said:
Looks like there is already a landing page for it here: ZuluIDE. Not sure what they can do about transfer speed though.
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The point of this thing appears to be for emulating an IDE CD-ROM drive, not a disk drive?

Anyway. The main retrocomputing gripe that exists with CF cards (and this would reasonably extend to IDE->SD adapters, since they are based on chips that emulate CF cards) is that they don't necessarily work with ancient IDE controllers/BIOSes that expect IDE drives to behave like MFM controllers, IE, CHS addressing. For this use case a thing that could specifically emulate this use case might be a handy thing to have, but... eh. For PC compatibles stuffing in an XTIDE BIOS chip in can make the whole thing go away, so... maybe I'm thinking a thread like this is making a mountain out of a pretty small molehill.

And what wasn't even mentioned here is there *are* MFM disk drive emulators, if you really want to stick closer to the original if you're dealing with an ancient system and want to keep the original controller. They're "expensive", but costs are all relative these days. In real dollars those emulators are pennies on the dollar compared to what MFM hard disks costs new in the 1980's.


VERAULT said:
All in favor of not allowing posts of this nature which are pure conjecture from ChatGPT say aye.
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Yes, this, a thousand times this. The Internet does not need more of this garbage vomited up into it.
 
Chuck, No crud, I was pointing out that CF and Gotec are not alike,. OP suggested and both are solutions for long term storage on vintage computers. I was suggesting that the two differ greatly for laptop usage.
 
Sort of on topic. Is there a program you can use on systems with ide auto detect thst will display the detected ide hdd parameters ? So you can use them on systems with manual input?
 
Eudimorphodon said:
The point of this thing appears to be for emulating an IDE CD-ROM drive, not a disk drive?
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That actually doesn't sound so bad if you really like physical media. Imagine having a whole box of SD cards each with your specific CD images loaded on them. The only real problem is its Micro SD so they are a bit tough to label.

That said I'm sure it'll do HD emulation eventually, is kinda pointless otherwise.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
That said I'm sure it'll do HD emulation eventually, is kinda pointless otherwise.
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No? There are lots of native flash solutions to emulate hard disks. (CF, SD->IDE, PATA->SATA/M.2/MSATA bridges.) Emulating a *CD-ROM* is a very specific niche that's not covered. (IE, in theory at least you could have a dingus like this able to take a dump of CD that has both data and Redbook audio tracks on it. You can't do that on a flash drive. In fact, to really make the case for this thing they should add analog audio headers to it.)
 
DeltaDon said:
CF's are much faster than early 2.5" hard drives with little to no memory cache.
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Some very old CFs and SD cards can semi-randomly encounter some significant latency on writes, which under the very, very worst cases could make these cards perform worse than a spinning hard disk, but that's an edge case you're just not at all likely to run into.

What really makes me laugh is when people worry about the performance of, say, SD->IDE adapters when the host computer is an XT-IDE. I've benchmarked it, the SD adapter in my 8-bit XT-CF card in a Tandy 1000 benchmarks effectively the same as a RAM disk. :rolleyes:
 
hunterjwizzard said:
That actually doesn't sound so bad if you really like physical media. Imagine having a whole box of SD cards each with your specific CD images loaded on them. The only real problem is its Micro SD so they are a bit tough to label.

That said I'm sure it'll do HD emulation eventually, is kinda pointless otherwise.
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The idea is that you would dump all your ISOs onto a single SD card, then you never have to swap in CDs. It's a bit pointless to have individual SD cards for each CD. Might as well just keep using CDs then.
 
Plasma said:
The idea is that you would dump all your ISOs onto a single SD card, then you never have to swap in CDs. It's a bit pointless to have individual SD cards for each CD. Might as well just keep using CDs then.
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Well except CDs wear out. But yes, having a single SD card hold large numbers of CD ISOs actually sounds cool. Either way its neat.
 
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