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?
23 Sep
23 Sep
8:19 a.m.
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.
The 50 pin drives are getting harder to find and the ones that are
available are reaching the end of their useful life anyway.
You're right in that modern operating systems are constantly writing to
the drive for swap space and paging files, but this solution is more aimed
at vintage systems that don't have a huge number of constant write cycles
like that. Also from what I've seen, the CF interface is used mostly by
the Apple IIe/IIgs users that don't have operating systems that utilize
paging files, etc.
For machines that do have lots of swapping going on, you can just use a
regular IDE drive instead of adding the additional CF layer.
This is just another tool in the box to allow people to use vintage
systems that have failing or very rare storage options.
g.
--
Proud owner of F-15C 80-0007
http://www.f15sim.com - The only one of its kind.
2:20 p.m.
james wrote:
Flash as a
PC disk has the problem of a limited number of writes.
IBM Microdrives don't have this problem, as they are, in fact, tiny hard
disks in a CFII form factor. I use one on my XT and love it.
Am I missing something here?
Size. It's difficult to put a hard drive in vintage hardware where it
wasn't designed to go, but CF cards are tiny and fit wedged inbetween
all kinds of things :)
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Help our electronic games project: http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
A child borne of the home computer wars: http://trixter.wordpress.com/
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participants (3)
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geneb＠deltasoft.com -
james＠jdfogg.com -
trixter＠oldskool.org