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

Disc rot is caused by manufacturing defects and improper storage, not how many times you read the disc. It also primarily affects laserdiscs.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Or just ZuluSCSI, 50 pin IDE is plenty fast enough for CDrom stuff on older machines.
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I'm a big fan of SCSI, but I think it has some drawbacks for your average user:

- Also need to get a SCSI HBA (adapter); are there modern replacements yet? Last I looked, ISA SCSI HBAs didn't seem to be that hard to get, but they were relatively expensive for something that I wouldn't have imagined that many people would have a use for.

- Many HBAs will have a BIOS that will consume some of the upper memory area. I know some don't have a BIOS, and they'd be fine to use if you don't want to boot from the drive, but I don't know how easy it is to find those. I know some let you control whether the BIOS is installed - which I assume means whether it hooks interrupt 13h - but I'm not sure if there is some way with any HBAs to remove the BIOS from the upper memory area?

- Also need to get a SCSI cable, although I suppose when you order ZuluSCSI you can probably tick a box to get one of those.

- Also need to learn about SCSI IDs and termination, although with most HBAs probably being set to ID 7, and the ZuluSCSI probably set to something other than 7 when it's shipped, and probably having termination enabled when shipped (I'm just assuming it's a very "nice" SCSI device) that might not be necessary for most users.

- Needs different drivers which can be harder to find, including some HBA-specific drivers, as compared to an IDE CD-ROM drive which can use generic drivers which are everywhere.

Of course a big benefit of ZuluSCSI is that it already exists :biggrin:
 
doshea said:
I'm a big fan of SCSI, but I think it has some drawbacks for your average user:

- Also need to get a SCSI HBA (adapter); are there modern replacements yet? Last I looked, ISA SCSI HBAs didn't seem to be that hard to get, but they were relatively expensive for something that I wouldn't have imagined that many people would have a use for.
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I was more thinking the later Pentium use-case. PCI SCSI cards are plentiful and cheap and drivers are plentiful. Especially if you just need a single card that does 50 pin. ISA cards are still not that hard to find since it was the standard for a long time.

doshea said:
- Also need to get a SCSI cable, although I suppose when you order ZuluSCSI you can probably tick a box to get one of those.
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50 pin ribbon cables are, in fact, still being actively manufactured. I'm not sure what they are still being used for, probably servicing some industrial machines, but believe it or not that's the easiest part of this process :p

doshea said:
- Also need to learn about SCSI IDs and termination, although with most HBAs probably being set to ID 7, and the ZuluSCSI probably set to something other than 7 when it's shipped, and probably having termination enabled when shipped (I'm just assuming it's a very "nice" SCSI device) that might not be necessary for most users.
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The Zulu is particularly neat because it lets you emulate 7 different devices at once. Yeah you have to learn to use the device but that's going to be the same for any sort of modern replacement device like the gotek or CF/IDE adapters.

doshea said:
Of course a big benefit of ZuluSCSI is that it already exists :biggrin:
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And that right there is the key advantage :D
 
I dont mean to side track this thread but I have one question for the folks who have been recommending Bluescsi. HAs anyone gotten a bluescsi (and im especially concerned for the early blue pill model specifically) to easily work on an apple II computer? And not only specific to one single scsi card variety as they are all very expensive at this point. I know when I tried on multiple scsi cards I could not get them to work and that was a huge disappointment for me.
 
VERAULT said:
I dont mean to side track this thread but I have one question for the folks who have been recommending Bluescsi. HAs anyone gotten a bluescsi (and im especially concerned for the early blue pill model specifically) to easily work on an apple II computer? And not only specific to one single scsi card variety as they are all very expensive at this point. I know when I tried on multiple scsi cards I could not get them to work and that was a huge disappointment for me.
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BlueSCSI boards are very picky about the disk images and file names used. If you get a slight typo, or a problem with the disk image, it won't work.

I'm not familiar with hard drives on Apple II machines, but I'd imagine it would be a headache with the tiny partition sizes required. Isn't the max partition size something like 32 MB?
 
GiGaBiTe said:
BlueSCSI boards are very picky about the disk images and file names used. If you get a slight typo, or a problem with the disk image, it won't work.

I'm not familiar with hard drives on Apple II machines, but I'd imagine it would be a headache with the tiny partition sizes required. Isn't the max partition size something like 32 MB?
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i never had any problems like that when I was setting them up on macs.

Its not a headache, its just how things are on the apple II. Thats the type of thinking that makes these devices not useful to me.


32mb max for prodos but much larger if HFS is used on the IIGS.
 
Maybe something has changed since I messed with them, but I was never able to create any custom disk images for the BlueSCSI boards I was using, the images always ended up corrupted or unusable. I had to make due with the premade disk images.

The Mac SE also loves to clobber the drive if you hit a landmine of incompatible software. If you have System 7.x and try to run Dark Castle, it will stack smash, write garbage to all areas of system memory and the drive, crash and reboot. No more partitions.
 
Someone should develop two SCSI controller to adapters, one ISA and 1 PCI v1. The idea would be that you could mount your choice of 2.5" SSD on the ISA or PCI cards. 128, 256 a d 512GB SSD drives are dirt cheap now days. Most of it could be handled in a low cost FPGA. So long as it is SATA you could really use whatever HD you wanted and SCSI could take the size barrier away.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
Maybe something has changed since I messed with them, but I was never able to create any custom disk images for the BlueSCSI boards I was using, the images always ended up corrupted or unusable. I had to make due with the premade disk images.
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Yeah thats the same issue i was having with my bluescsi and zuluscsi. It would work. Id install or run something i wanted. It would crash and corrupt the image. Id have to reload the image and try again. It was super pickey and finickey. Maybe they ironed things out but i got the zuluscsi when it was brand new and to me it behaved the same way as the bluescsi.
 
With regard to the ZuluSCSI and the Blue to a degree there have been loads of firmware releases that have fixed a ton of issues and added a lot of features. Perhaps the newer releases will fix your issues? One thing they added with Zulu that makes it super easy to create images is to put a text file on the SD cart with the CREATE function. Then the Zulu can create images in any size based on file name tags.

BlueSCSI 1 in the early days was very much being updated to overcome some of the glitches and incompatibility's that people were finding.

Some stats:
BlueSCSI V1 has 13 firmware releases with the latest being 11/16/23
BlueSCSI V2 has 10 firmware releases with the latest being 2/22/24
ZuluScsi has 36 firmware releases with the latest being 3/7/2024

It should be noted that BlueSCSI V2 is a fork of ZuluSCSI (Which also contains code from SCSI2SD).

Since it is a community project it is also important to report those bugs to the github site as it will only help create a more robust project.

That said I do want a solution as above but for ALL versions of IDE. I know that is a big ask and probably a big challenge but I do think we will have it one day.
 
Well I sold the zuluscsi. I have 4 bluescsi I built and maybe 6 to 8 boards I havent built yet. I will go back and try new firmware and test again. Id like to use them in apple II so Im hoping someone did some work on that. Im sure it would be much more forgiving than the mac environment.
 
EverStaR said:
Someone should develop two SCSI controller to adapters, one ISA and 1 PCI v1. The idea would be that you could mount your choice of 2.5" SSD on the ISA or PCI cards. 128, 256 a d 512GB SSD drives are dirt cheap now days. Most of it could be handled in a low cost FPGA. So long as it is SATA you could really use whatever HD you wanted and SCSI could take the size barrier away.
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They already have these:

store.rabbitholecomputing.com

SATA PCI Hard Card

store.rabbitholecomputing.com

PCI, takes either a SATA drive(spinning or SSD) or an NVMe.

For the ISA world existing ISA-to-adapters fill the niche. You just don't need more than what fits on a CF card if you're in the ISA world.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
They already have these:

store.rabbitholecomputing.com

SATA PCI Hard Card

store.rabbitholecomputing.com

PCI, takes either a SATA drive(spinning or SSD) or an NVMe.

For the ISA world existing ISA-to-adapters fill the niche. You just don't need more than what fits on a CF card if you're in
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Nope, not a size or speed issue, more of a dependability issue for me in the ISA world. But I could use about 30GB to hold all I want on my ISA final system.
 
EverStaR said:
Nope, not a size or speed issue, more of a dependability issue for me in the ISA world. But I could use about 30GB to hold all I want on my ISA final system.
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I feel like the operating system becomes the bottle neck at that point.
 
EverStaR said:
Nope, not a size or speed issue, more of a dependability issue for me in the ISA world. But I could use about 30GB to hold all I want on my ISA final system.
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You're going to need some exceedingly eccentric system for that to work. FAT16 has 2 GB partition limits, you're going to have a crapton of drive letters. FreeDOS supports FAT32, but I don't know how far back that goes CPU support wise. Volumes that large are going to have significant data integrity issues.
 
GiGaBiTe said:
You're going to need some exceedingly eccentric system for that to work. FAT16 has 2 GB partition limits, you're going to have a crapton of drive letters. FreeDOS supports FAT32, but I don't know how far back that goes CPU support wise. Volumes that large are going to have significant data integrity issues.
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I know multi-gig file systems existed back in the 8 and 16 bit ISA eras but these were deep magic restricted to specialized storage systems. My dad often tells the story of a 4.5 gig system he worked on back in the early 90s that used removable platters the size of an LP record. This system stored the database and was attached directly to a purpose-built server. You might be able to access it from a personal computer but only through the network.
 
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