On 12/1/11 12:10 PM, "Matthew Hudson" <hexsane at gmail.com> wrote: -snip- Actually, a low cost device based on a microcontroller would be sweet. I am assembling one of those prototype SCSI<->IDE controllers and so far I'm into it around $30 in parts beyond the board.

SCSI drives are rare? I have a bunch. Came out of old Compaq servers. What am I bid? I got 9gb, 18gb, maybe a few 36gb, maybe some 2gb and 4gb. I'd have to poke about. I thought these things were common as dirt. At 02:21 PM 12/1/2011, you wrote: 591 . [Science] This book fills a much-needed gap. --Moses Hadas when he was asked to say something nice about a fellow scientist's new book. NEW: a50mhzham at gmail.com ? N9QQB (amateur radio) "HEY YOU" (loud shouting) ? Second Tops (Set Dancing) ? FIND ME ON FACEBOOK 43? 7' 17.2" N by 88? 6' 28.9" W ? Elevation 815' ? Grid Square EN53wc LAN/Telecom Analyst ? Open-source Dude ? Musician ? Registered Linux User 385531

On Dec 1, 2011, at 6:02 PM, Tom wrote: I've had a hard time finding them cheaply even on eBay. Are these single-ended SCSI, preferably narrow? If so, I'll gladly pony up some cash for them. Otherwise, the sea of adaptors I have always seems to be missing the one I need... I have one that's SCA2 to 50-pin, but I always seem to end up with SCA(1) drives that don't seem to work with it. - Dave

In article <1322771057.4100.YahooMailClassic at web121608.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> writes: Yep, but running things from compact flash is going to be less moving parts and less power and easier to swap around. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 version available for download <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com/the-direct3d-graphics-pipeline/> Legalize Adulthood! <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

I've got a similar setup: - an ACARD AEC7720U SCSI to IDE bridge adapter which I bought from the UK for approx UKP 46 including VAT, airmail postage etc. - an IDE to CF adapter which I bought of DealExtreme, Hong Kong for about EUR5. The ACARD adapter is connected to the narrow SCSI bus in a DEC Alpha running VMS. I use this for reading CF cards, not for running VMS from a CF card. The setup works but it's not ideal. The biggest problem is when I swap the CF card, the combination sulks until I power both adapters off and on again together. I vaguely recall that a more expensive ACARD adapter (or possibly IDE to CF adapter - I forget which) may have offered the ability to hotswap the card. The mechanical arrangement is not ideal either. The IDE to CF adapter has a 40 pin IDC socket on the board for the IDE connection and the ACARD adapter similarly has a 40 pin IDC plug. Fitting these directly together makes it hard to get at the CF slot. I suppose I could make up a short lead... Regards, Peter Coghlan.

My son did some extensive R&D for an IDE<->CF adapter for systems used for a bowling ally. Initially, they would not boot the operating system, so something special was required. All of the hardware, including the CF card, was under $ 50 in small lots of about 10. The cost would probably be much less in larger lots. As for SCSI drives, I purchased some RZ28D-E drives (just a Seagate ST32550N drives - or 2 GB) over ten years ago. I have not needed to use then lately since I am using 1 TB SATA drives these days. But I would be very surprised if more than 10% of them were not working. Likewise, I have a few Sony SMO S-501 drives which use 295 MB media (actually doubled sided media - but only one side of the media can be used at any time) with a large number of the media. They are rather slow compared to everything new these days, but 10 years ago they were still my primary backup for both the PDP-11 and the PC. Jerome Fine

I bought it in March 2008 from Worldspan Communications. Checking their website http://www.span.com now, they are quoting me prices in Euro instead of UKP and they are looking for EUR 104.73 including VAT (but excluding postage I think). I think there was a big difference between the price of the narrow version and the wide version at the time and that convinced me to buy the narrow version. I don't remember but I probably did a bit of hunting to find a good price. I briefly checked mine worked with an IDE disk when I got it but I haven't checked to see how fast it is or whether there are any gotyas. Regards, Peter Coghlan.

Now I'm curious: what are you dealing with that fails with disks over 1G? Perhaps a machine with a SCSI interface running in target mode (and some other disk interface, SCSI or otherwise, to back requests) would be an appropriate way to address this? I don't know much about software support for target mode, but it must exist to _some_ extent. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Many such systems will work fine with disks over 1G; they'll just be able to use only the first 1G of them. (This assumes software can be told to use only part of a drive's self-reported capacity, which of course may not be so in your case.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

I had VMS in mind. But my VMS experience does not include any SCSI disks, nor anything over 1G in size, so I didn't actually know whether it can be told to do anything like the partitioning typical Unices can do (which would make it much easier to put everything accessed with the ROM driver below the magic 1G boundary). All software sucks...just in different ways. :/ /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Zitat von David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com>: There were patches out the for the PROMS to solve that. (Not official, but somebody did that)

Mr Ian Primus wrote: Not small ones, though. I'd vote for one of those. I'd even pay for one of those :-) -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York

On 12/1/2011 1:55 PM, Philip Pemberton wrote: I was going to reply only off list, but the lemmings are all responding here, so I will as well (and I'll send a personal email to boot). Sign me up. I've been doing research for a few weeks on ways to accomplish this, but had not thought to post to the list. I have working SD routines, and a nice uC option (ST32F4 series), but was stuck at the SCSI interface layer. I was hoping to sidestep the need for an FPGA, just because they can inflate the cost of a project quite a bit. In any event, I am extremely interested in this. I have SD code, FAT12/16/32 LFN code, and code to handle some image formats, though more code is no doubt needed. Jim -- Jim Brain brain at jbrain.com www.jbrain.com

On 1 Dec 2011 at 22:38, David Riley wrote: Don't both Acard and Addonics have something along this line already? I know that Addonics has a SCSI-SATA converter and I think that Acard still makes a SCSI-ATA converter. The latter can connect to a regular SATA SSD if a high-performance solid-state soluation is needed. The former can connect to an IDE-CF adapter (cheap) if a CF solution is needed. I've also seen on eBay some 2.5" form factor SCSI-to-CF internal Mac- style adapters on That Auction Site. What am I missing? --Chuck

David Riley wrote: number of other reasons). I've used TI/Luminary/Stellaris parts for several projects. What do you find undesirable about them?

On Dec 2, 2011, at 3:09 AM, Eric Smith wrote: I don't find them generally undesirable (we've used them in projects, too), but their voltage rails aren't as flexible. Perhaps I'm overthinking it (a result of too many projects where the rails got out of hand). I'm actually having a hard time remembering now what in particular I was thinking about as far as problems with the Stellaris. Their ROMed drivers are a nice feature, and the built-in PHY is pretty handy. I guess it's probably a result of too many unfortunate interactions with TI's support on other projects. They have a nasty habit (probably from experience, but still) of assuming that if you're asking for the datasheet for something, you're going to be calling their engineers up for support all the time. We had an outdoor wildlife camera project where the requirement was booting from a cold start and take a picture in under a second. Not entirely unreasonable if you're running on bare metal. TI had one of their media processing chips with an embedded JPEG engine, and I asked for the datasheet to that part (which was unreleased). They told me to just "use the provided Linux driver", regardless of my protestations that that wasn't really an option for something that needed to boot in a second. Anyway, long-winded rant. The Stellaris parts are fine, I think I just have some negative associations with TI support that color my thinking. :-) - Dave

Tentatively, I would be, though I suspect it wouldn't be worth enough to me to be worth making. SATA would be worth significantly more to me. (No, I haven't investigated whether it exists; I haven't yet wanted it badly enough to get past the activation energy, which is high since the only feasible search mechanism left these days is the Web.) /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

On Dec 2, 2011, at 8:48 AM, John Foust wrote: Probably not for speed, but if you want it to look like a real hard drive as much as possible, it matters. Especially on PCs, where the BIOS tricks used to make USB drives look like IDE drives can really confuse an OS once it boots and sees it as a USB device as well. - Dave

On Thu, 1 Dec 2011, Philip Pemberton wrote: I'm sitting here looking at one at the moment. It's an SCM PCD-P50B. As recently as a month ago, they were available new from: http://a4000t.com/ for $62.00 US. The SCM unit maps the various cards to LUNs, which admittedly is not supported by much of anything classic. Steve --

On Dec 4, 2011 11:22 AM, "Steven Hirsch" <snhirsch at gmail.com> wrote: hard disk drive, which allowed SD or CompactFlash cards to be connected to a SCSI bus? recently as a month ago, they were available new from: Looks interesting. I just ordered one. I'll see how it works with a CMD CQD-220 on a PDP-11 system.

I bought a SCM PCD-50B SCSI Card Reader from http://a4000t.com for $62 plus shipping. So far I have been unable to get it to work with either a DEC VS3100 M76 or an InfoServer 1000. I was able to get it to work with a CMD CQD-220/TM in a PDP-11/73 system with RT-11 and XXDP 2.5. Haven't tried RSTS/E or 2.11BSD yet. I have EPROM firmware versions F220Y1A8 / F220Y2A8 on my CMD CQD-220/TM. The device configuration menu allows you to specify the SCSI ID and LUN for each logical drive. For example you can specify LUN 1 for the Compact Flash slot of the SCM PCD-50B. With the CMD CQD-220/TM I found that I had to disable Synchronous mode for the SCM PCD-50B or I would get errors. The first example output below shows the CMD CQD-220/TM configuration with Synchronous mode enabled and an error that occurs when booting XXDP from RD45 configured as DU1: and attempting to copy files to the SCM PCD-50B Compact Flash slot configured as DU0: The second example output below shows the CMD CQD-220/TM configuration with Synchronous mode disabled. In this configuration no errors occur when booting XXDP from RD45 configured as DU1: and copying files to the SCM PCD-50B Compact Flash slot configured as DU0: I was then able to successfully boot from the Compact Flash slot of the SCM PCD-50B and successfully run XXDP 2.5 diagnostics. FAILURE: -------- SCANNING SCSI DEVICES ATTACHED ... DEV0: DU0 SCSI ID 0 LUN 1 SCSI Compact Flash 1.28 Disconnect ON,Sync Mode ON,Prevent Medium Removal ON,Write W/Verify OFF, DEV1: DU1 SCSI ID 1 LUN 0 DEC RRD45 (C) DEC 0436 Disconnect ON,Sync Mode ON,Prevent Medium Removal ON,Write W/Verify OFF, DEV2 NOT AVAILABLE DEV3 NOT AVAILABLE DEV4 NOT AVAILABLE DEV5 NOT AVAILABLE DEV6 NOT AVAILABLE DEV7 SCSI ID 7 HOST ADAPTER, SCSI Reset ON,Density Mode ON, CHANGE CONFIGURATION ? (Y/N) N BOOTING UP XXDP-XM EXTENDED MONITOR XXDP-XM EXTENDED MONITOR - XXDP V2.5 REVISION: F0 BOOTED FROM DU1 124KW OF MEMORY NON-UNIBUS SYSTEM RESTART ADDRESS: 152000 TYPE "H" FOR HELP ! .INITIALIZE DU0: USER DATA ON DU0 WILL BE DESTROYED ! PROCEED?(Y/N/CR=N)Y .COPY DU1:*.* DU0: XXDPXM.SYS XXDPSM.SYS DRSXM .SYS ?WT ERR SUCCESS: -------- SCANNING SCSI DEVICES ATTACHED ... DEV0: DU0 SCSI ID 0 LUN 1 SCSI Compact Flash 1.28 Disconnect ON,Sync Mode OFF,Prevent Medium Removal ON,Write W/Verify OFF, DEV1: DU1 SCSI ID 1 LUN 0 DEC RRD45 (C) DEC 0436 Disconnect ON,Sync Mode ON,Prevent Medium Removal ON,Write W/Verify OFF, DEV2 NOT AVAILABLE DEV3 NOT AVAILABLE DEV4 NOT AVAILABLE DEV5 NOT AVAILABLE DEV6 NOT AVAILABLE DEV7 SCSI ID 7 HOST ADAPTER, SCSI Reset ON,Density Mode ON, CHANGE CONFIGURATION ? (Y/N) N