13 Jan
2004
13 Jan
'04
9:49 p.m.
IDE or SCSI are the choices we have with IDE drives
being frequently
available. However there is no clear solution (that I've seen) as to an ATA
interface to either Qbus or Unibus.
SCSI, on the other hand as discussion here has shown, presents a more
practical mass storage system because there are plentiful reasonably priced
small-sized SCSI drives out there and even drive interface cards to be
found, albeit the cards are relatively expensive and somewhat hard to find.
I really feel that unless you're a serious hardware hacker, SCSI is the way
to go. While finding a SCSI controller will definitely take time and money,
they can be obtained quite reasonably if you're lucky enough (I've obtained
one for $5, and another for $50). For drives, all you need is a Narrow SCSI
drive, and the odds are you don't need anything bigger than 2Gb (I use
100Mb, 200Mb, and 2Gb) drives on my systems). SCSI drives of that size are
available, basically for free.
To that end, given that there were two known homebrew
IDE/ATA adapters (one
from Ukraine; other shown at: http://www.chd.dyndns.org/qbus_ide/ ), I want
to know everybody's opinion of these?
I know sometime late last year there was some discussion of IDE on the DEC
busses and I think the question was raised as to whether either worked and
how well. The question did not get completely answered from what I can
find. In fact, the dyndns.org ATA adapter has not shown any development
progress since April 2002, so it may be a non-starter.
What has anybody else done toward getting an IDE/ATA adapter of some sort
built and stuffed into their Qbus or Unibus machine(s)?
The Ukraine adapter isn't really practical unless you're in the former
Soviet Union, and have access to chips that aren't easially available
elsewhere. The "CHD" controller (who is CHD?) looks promising, but it also
looks like a dead project.
One other idea that has been bounced around for Q-Bus VAXen is to install a
FDDI card in the Q-Bus system, and a second card in another VMS system, and
then boot off of a cluster disk. Theoretically it has the potential to be
faster than any disk available on a Q-Bus system! The problem is getting
the parts to test the theory, as Q-Bus FDDI cards aren't easy to obtain (I'm
looking for one).
Zane