23 Sep
2008
23 Sep
'08
7:57 a.m.
There has been a lot of activity recently among the
Apple
II/IIgs crowd about using the combination of a cheap SCSI
to IDE bridge and an IDE to CF adapter to use Compact
Flash memory cards in their computers.
This apparently is working quite well and after doing some
research I've seen examples of people using this set up
to replace dead SCSI drives in vintage Macs, Suns and at
least one NeXT workstation.
There is a vendor selling these adapters for $30 each.
The eBay item # is 350044078177. I did some digging and
the documentation can be found here:
http://dl.acard.com/manual/english/aec-7720u&uw.pdf
I hope you folks can use this to revive some bit of rare
hardware that needed a new hard disk. :)
I'm now looking to get one or two 8 bit ISA SCSI boards
that I can use in a couple of 5160 PC/XT machines I've
got. They need to be "bootable" cards. If you have one
or two you want to part with, please contact me off list.
I'm not sure of the reasons for a long chain of conversions
like that. Small 50 pin SCSI disks should still be around,
and there should be a larger supply of IDE disks. Flash as a
PC disk has the problem of a limited number of writes. Flash
isn't forever and PC operating systems use fixed disks for
things like memory swap and temp files.
Am I missing something here?