9 Nov
2013
9 Nov
'13
12:55 p.m.
On Thu, Nov 07, 2013 at 10:10:55PM +0000, Peter Coghlan wrote:
[...]
In 2008, I bought an Acard AEC-7720U 50pin SCSI to IDE
adapter for EUR 60
plus an IDE to CF adapter from Hong Kong for less than EUR 2. Unfortunately,
I think the price of the former has increased since.
I picked up mine on eBay for about ?35 back in 2003. Current prices are now an
eyewatering ?190! I think I'll skip the project I was planning that required me
to acquire a second one.
Anyway, for anybody who is lucky enough to be able to acquire one at a sane
price, they're lovely bits of kit and the firmware understand both IDE and
ATAPI. Sadly, the IDE support is limited to LBA28, so you can only use the
first 137GB of large disks. The ATAPI support has worked with every optical
drive I've tried, including DVD writers, and it never resulted in coasters. I
also tried it with a LS120 drive, and indeed I had a 1.44MB "disk" turn up on
the SCSI bus when I inserted a floppy :)