15 May
2014
15 May
'14
1:04 a.m.
The SCSI2SD project
(http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD) was brought
up here a few months back -- it's effectively a SCSI disk emulator,
using Micro-SD cards as the backing store. I ordered a couple and I
started chatting with the creator (Michael) about supporting
non-standard sector sizes (for example, the 1280 byte/sectors that the
Symbolics XL400, XL1200, and XL1201 demand...) SCSI drives that support
sector sizes other than 512 bytes are getting more and more hard to
find, and having a modern replacement would be awesome.
Michael was extremely receptive to the idea (he was already working on
256 byte/sector support) and added non-standard sector size support
(from 64 to 2048 bytes/sector) and I tried it out with my XL1200. It
didn't work initially, but over the last month we've iterated over a few
potential fixes, with me gathering logs and diagnostics and him doing
all the hard work of fixing the firmware. And finally this morning the
last bug was squashed -- I have my XL1200 booting Genera entirely from
a Micro-SD card. It actually seems to be a little bit faster than the
Seagate drive I've been using (and I'm still running a debug version of
the firmware) :).
If anyone's looking for a replacement for oddball SCSI devices like
this, the SCSI2SD seems to be a pretty good option. Michael has been
very receptive to bug reports and suggestions (and of course, the source
is open to anyone who wants to hack away at it...)
Just thought there might be a few people on this list interested in this
news...
- Josh