21 May
2021
21 May
'21
1:41 p.m.
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board to replace a Hard Drive on a VAXstation
or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them on some of my systems to reduce the
amount of noise. I?ve gotten used to a quiet office. :-)
Zane
21 May
21 May
2:10 p.m.
Zane,
I have one in a VaxStation. To be honest I can't remember which Vaxstation. I think it
was the 3100/30 because it will only boot from a 1Gb or less drive and the SCSI2SD allows
a lot of different config options.
Of course, there are lots of different Vaxstations with different SCSI hardware. There are
many different SCSI2SD as well.
So as usual, "Your Milage might vary"
Dave
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Zane Healy via
cctalk
Sent: 21 May 2021 21:41
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
<cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Subject: SCSI2SD
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board to replace a Hard Drive
on a VAXstation or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them on some
of my systems to reduce the amount of noise. I?ve gotten used to a quiet
office. :-)
Zane
2:26 p.m.
On 5/21/21 3:41 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board to
replace a Hard Drive on a VAXstation or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them on
some of my systems to reduce the amount of noise. I?ve gotten used to a quiet office. :-)
I've used one on a VS4000/VLC. I didn't have any issues.
--
Eric Dittman
3:12 p.m.
I know a lot of folk using SCSI2SD in VAXen with great success, and now
there's a new kid on the block that was originally for the Sharp X68000 but
is currently being heavily tested on 68K Macs and I see no reason why it
shouldn't work on low-end VAXen too. I'll be ordering one soon to try.
Home ? akuker/RASCSI Wiki ? GitHub <https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki>
<https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki>
--
Adrian Graham
Owner of Binary Dinosaurs, the UK's biggest private home computer
collection?
t: @binarydinosaurs f: facebook.com/binarydinosaurs
w: www.binarydinosaurs.co.uk
On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 21:41, Zane Healy via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board to
replace a Hard Drive
on a VAXstation or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them on some
of my systems to reduce the amount of noise. I?ve gotten used to a quiet
office. :-)
Zane
5:15 p.m.
On 5/21/2021 3:41 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board to
replace a Hard Drive on a VAXstation or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them on
some of my systems to reduce the amount of noise. I?ve gotten used to a quiet office.
:-)
Zane
I've got a SCSI2SD V5 in my MicroVAX 3100 M95. It sits on the SCSI bus along with the
CDrom drive and a couple of 18GB Compaq/Seagate drives.? I've also got a SCSI2SD V6 in
each of my two AlphaSever DS10 systems.? I had a few issues with the MV and an earlier
version of the V5 firmware, but the last few versions have been no trouble at all.
In the MV3100 I mounted the SCSI2SD on a 3.5" 3-D printed mount which is mounted on a
3.5" to 5.25" mount and it's mounted in the front opening next to the CDROM
drive.
In the DS10's the 3.5" 3-D printed mount is put in the floppy opening.
--
John H. Reinhardt
PRRT&HS #8909
C&O HS #11530
N-Trak #7566
22 May
22 May
8:29 a.m.
On May 21, 2021, at 5:15 PM, John H. Reinhardt via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
On 5/21/2021 3:41 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
This is definitely good info John, how is the SCSI2SD performance on the DS10?s? I?m
pondering using either an AlphaStation 200 4/233 or a AlphaStation 500/333 as a
workstation, rather than my DEC PWS 433a or my Compaq XP1000/667, simply due to power
usage, and heat generation.
I just placed an order for the initial 4 V5.2 boards I?ll need. Once they have V6 boards
back in stock, I?ll need to order a couple of those as well. These should definitely help
reduce heat, noise, and power consumption.
Zane
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board
to replace a Hard Drive on a VAXstation or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them
on some of my systems to reduce the amount of noise. I?ve gotten used to a quiet office.
:-)
Zane
I've got a SCSI2SD V5 in my MicroVAX 3100 M95. It sits on the SCSI bus along with the
CDrom drive and a couple of 18GB Compaq/Seagate drives. I've also got a SCSI2SD V6 in
each of my two AlphaSever DS10 systems. I had a few issues with the MV and an earlier
version of the V5 firmware, but the last few versions have been no trouble at all.
In the MV3100 I mounted the SCSI2SD on a 3.5" 3-D printed mount which is mounted on
a 3.5" to 5.25" mount and it's mounted in the front opening next to the
CDROM drive.
In the DS10's the 3.5" 3-D printed mount is put in the floppy opening. 
8:35 a.m.
I just placed an order for the initial 4 V5.2 boards
I?ll need. Once
they have V6 boards back in stock, I?ll need to order a couple of those
as well. These should definitely help reduce heat, noise, and power
consumption.
I am wondering if anyone has used these to replace HDDs in RAID configurations? My thought
would be it should work fine as long as they look like real HDD to the system but who
knows?
-Ali
8:48 a.m.
On May 22, 2021, at 8:35 AM, Ali <cctalk at ibm51xx.net> wrote:
That is a good question. Since I?m primarily getting these for OpenVMS, one of the
reasons I went with 4 boards to start is that I figure I can use Volume Shadowing on one
of the systems.
I do wish that they offered UW-SCSI, and SCA SCSI options.
Zane
I just placed an order for the initial 4 V5.2
boards I?ll need. Once
they have V6 boards back in stock, I?ll need to order a couple of those
as well. These should definitely help reduce heat, noise, and power
consumption.
I am wondering if anyone has used these to replace HDDs in RAID configurations? My
thought would be it should work fine as long as they look like real HDD to the system but
who knows?
-Ali
9:12 a.m.
I am wondering if anyone has used these to replace
HDDs in RAID
configurations? My thought would be it should work fine as long as they
look like real HDD to the system but who knows?
Looking at the FAQ it looks like it does:
"Does SCSI2SD do ECC or mirroring ?
No. However, you can configure SCSI2SD as up to four devices and use whatever RAID, data
duplication, striping, or mirroring capabilities your equipment supports."
In fact it looks like you can subdivide one card into four virtual drives and do mirroring
and RAID on one card. Kind of defeats the purpose but I guess it can be a cheap solution
to avoid having to buy multiple boards.
Now if they would make an UW version....
-Ali
9:19 a.m.
On May 22, 2021, at 9:12 AM, Ali <cctalk at ibm51xx.net> wrote:
In this the weakest link would appear to be the SD Card. As such it seems to me that the
best solution would be to have 2 or more SCSI2SD?s in the device. I?m not sure what
benefit would be achieved by using a single board to present multiple devices. Unless of
course you had a drive size limitation, or you?re trying to emulate something like 2GB or
4GB drives. As an example, that would be handy for VAXen with a 1GB Boot Drive
limitation.
Zane
I am wondering if anyone has used these to
replace HDDs in RAID
configurations? My thought would be it should work fine as long as they
look like real HDD to the system but who knows?
Looking at the FAQ it looks like it does:
"Does SCSI2SD do ECC or mirroring ?
No. However, you can configure SCSI2SD as up to four devices and use whatever RAID, data
duplication, striping, or mirroring capabilities your equipment supports."
In fact it looks like you can subdivide one card into four virtual drives and do
mirroring and RAID on one card. Kind of defeats the purpose but I guess it can be a cheap
solution to avoid having to buy multiple boards.
Now if they would make an UW version....
-Ali
9:24 a.m.
In this the weakest link would appear to be the SD
Card. As such it
seems to me that the best solution would be to have 2 or more SCSI2SD?s
in the device. I?m not sure what benefit would be achieved by using a
single board to present multiple devices. Unless of course you had a
drive size limitation, or you?re trying to emulate something like 2GB
or 4GB drives. As an example, that would be handy for VAXen with a 1GB
Boot Drive limitation.
Agreed. I think it would just be a cost saving measure. You need to replace 2 or more
drives and don't want to buy multiple SCSI2SD boards. As for drive size limitation you
can always get around that with partitioning and wasting the space on the rest of the
card.
-Ali
10:03 a.m.
On 5/22/21 9:19 AM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
In this the weakest link would appear to be the SD
Card. As such it seems to me that the best solution would be to have 2 or more SCSI2SD?s
in the device.
There should be SMART support so you can see what the state of the card is, assuming your
SD will push that information out through SPI
SD is not an SSD in that respect. People just live with the fact that an SD will just roll
over and die without warning.
10:55 a.m.
On 5/22/2021 10:29 AM, Zane Healy wrote:
On May 21, 2021, at 5:15 PM, John H. Reinhardt via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Zane,
They perform adequately. They are no speed demons for sure since they're basically
a SCSI-2 (there is a SCSI-2 Mode enable option) disk. They go about as fast as most
drives with a 50-pin interface do. It's been a while since I configured them but
I'm sure I have them set to the fastest speed. The SCSI2SD utility for V6 has a
dropdown box with speed choices and mine are either set to "Synch, 10MB/s" or to
"No Limit (safe)".
Truthfully though I haven't used them in a while in the DS10's since I did an
experiment with a P410 SmartArray card with two 256GB Samsung SSD's and it worked (and
is still working). The only downside to that is they have to be configured somewhere else
since the Alpha MSA utility doesn't understand them. But once configured (both cards
and SSD) then they work great. The other downside is no boot support so I need to either
boot from a normal SCSI drive or the SCSI2SD. I've thought about the latter, but
haven't tried it yet. Though I have booted from the SCSI2SD before.
I'm pretty sure at some point I experimented with using HBVS between two SCSI2SD
drives (partitions on the same SD since I only have one card in each system) and it
worked. But I can't find any notes so it might be something I intended to do but
didn't.
Regards,
John H. Reinhardt
On 5/21/2021 3:41 PM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
This is definitely good info John, how is the SCSI2SD performance on the DS10?s? I?m
pondering using either an AlphaStation 200 4/233 or a AlphaStation 500/333 as a
workstation, rather than my DEC PWS 433a or my Compaq XP1000/667, simply due to power
usage, and heat generation.
I just placed an order for the initial 4 V5.2 boards I?ll need. Once they have V6 boards
back in stock, I?ll need to order a couple of those as well. These should definitely help
reduce heat, noise, and power consumption.
Zane
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board
to replace a Hard Drive on a VAXstation or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them
on some of my systems to reduce the amount of noise. I?ve gotten used to a quiet office.
:-)
Zane
I've got a SCSI2SD V5 in my MicroVAX 3100 M95. It sits on the SCSI bus along with the
CDrom drive and a couple of 18GB Compaq/Seagate drives. I've also got a SCSI2SD V6 in
each of my two AlphaSever DS10 systems. I had a few issues with the MV and an earlier
version of the V5 firmware, but the last few versions have been no trouble at all.
In the MV3100 I mounted the SCSI2SD on a 3.5" 3-D printed mount which is mounted on
a 3.5" to 5.25" mount and it's mounted in the front opening next to the
CDROM drive.
In the DS10's the 3.5" 3-D printed mount is put in the floppy opening. 
23 May
23 May
10:42 a.m.
On 2021-05-21 16:41, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
Does anyone have experience using a SCSI2SD board to
replace a Hard Drive on a VAXstation or an AlphaStation? I?m thinking about using them on
some of my systems to reduce the amount of noise.
Yes, I'm using the on my 4000/90's ...
Get nice SD cards, and big ones too. And format the first partion to be
less than 1GB. So you can simply "dd" ISO images for install there ...
I?ve gotten used to a quiet office. :-)
Now you will have to climb under the desk to check if it runs. With the
rotating rust, it wasn't necessary, you knew all the time ;-)
Zane
1079
days inactive
1081
days old
13 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
aek＠bitsavers.org -
binarydinosaurs＠gmail.com -
cctalk＠ibm51xx.net -
dave.g4ugm＠gmail.com -
dittman＠dittman.net -
emu＠e-bbes.com -
healyzh＠avanthar.com -
johnhreinhardt＠thereinhardts.org