31 Aug
2013
31 Aug
'13
noon
On Sat, 31 Aug 2013, Alexandre Souza wrote:
On Fri, 30 Aug 2013, Tothwolf wrote:
Yes, the SCSI to IDE adapter is an interesting project. I passed up on
building one of the boards from first batch due to my current backlog of
other projects. I'm also not sure if it would work for my purposes due to
some of the design limitations, but I'll probably try one at a later date
anyway just to see what it does. I also have some XT-IDE boards from
Andrew that I've not yet built (in my project queue) which will do what I
originally intended to do with an 8-bit ISA SCSI card, SCSI to IDE bridge,
and a CompactFlash card.
If someone could come up with an inexpensive clone of what ACARD does with
their SCSI to IDE and SCSI to SATA bridges, they would likely sell very
well. ACARD's prices for these are simply too high which keeps them out of
reach of the typical hobbyist. There is going to be more and more demand
for such bridge devices in the future, especially if they don't have any
major performance bottlenecks and can operate at or near the same speed as
the SCSI bus.
As SCSI drives eventually fail, it would be nice to be able to replace
them with modern SATA drives, but one of the major challenges may be all
the different SCSI interfaces. It might not be possible for example to
physically fit a bridge board with a narrow SCSI connector along with a
narrow to wide adapter + high byte terminator into an existing drive sled,
so there would need to be many different bridge versions for the different
SCSI interfaces.
On Fri, 30 Aug 2013, Glen Slick wrote:
Andrew Lynch (on this list) is taking care of a good scsi emulator
project, google for n8vem scsi. On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Ethan Dicks
<ethan.dicks at gmail.com>
wrote:
ACARD made a number of ATA<->SCSI bridge devices that would allow an
ATA/IDE device to be used on a SCSI bus, but last I checked they were
reselling used for ~$150-200 USD. I eventually gave up on the idea of
hanging one of these along with a CompactFlash to IDE adapter off an 8-bit
ISA SCSI card that I have.
Here's a way-off idea from existing components... I wonder if one
could attach a SCSI<->IDE adapter to a 3rd Party TMSCP controller? If
so, then one might be able to _then_ hang an IDE<->CF interface off of
that. It would be one CF card==one "tape", but it would work. A
"real" TK50 stores up to 95MB (if the controller keeps the tape fed),
so a 128MB CF card would hold an entire tape's worth of bytes (unless
somehow blocking sizes messed things up and it took a larger card to
digest what was thrown at it).
I wonder how expensive these devices are. I suppose if you can't find
pricing information on the net anywhere and have to call up someone
for pricing information they are probably too expensive for anyone
here, although from the product photos the actual production cost
probably isn't too high.
http://www.ssd.gb.com/Products/SCSI_Bridge_Emulators_to_CF/index.php
http://www.ssd.gb.com/Products/Datasheets/SCSI_Bridge_Emulator_to_CF/PERTEC…