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Anyone try a Toshiba Flash Air Wi-Fi SD card with SCSI2SD?

timmerk

Member
I was curious if SCSI2SD would work with a Toshiba Flash Air Wi-Fi SD card - that way I wouldn't have to shutdown the Mac, remove the SD card, and insert in to another Mac to transfer files. Anyone try it? If not, I might give it a shot. I just don't know how SCSI2SD would react to files appearing or disappearing from another source.

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
I haven't gotten around to buying one yet so I can't say for certain this is right, but doesn't the SCSI2SD format an inserted SD card "natively"? Reading up on what the FlashAir does it looks to me like the FlashAir web server requires the card to be formatted with a FAT/xFAT filesystem. That means it could work with something like the FloppyEMU or another device that stores disk images but I don't think it'll work with SCSI2SD, unless it has a mode in which it acts on disk image containers stored in a FAT filesystem instead of partitioning and formatting the card like a real hard disk.

 

techknight

Well-known member
The problem with SD card based devices other than mass storage, requires the use of the SDIO protocol which I just about guarantee isnt implemented. Getting the full SDIO spec requires an NDA I believe. 

 

Gorgonops

Moderator
Staff member
The problem with SD card based devices other than mass storage, requires the use of the SDIO protocol which I just about guarantee isnt implemented. Getting the full SDIO spec requires an NDA I believe. 
The FlashAir card doesn't rely on an SDIO connection to the SD socket. (in normal "I'm a storage device" mode, anyway.) Basically how it works is it has a complete little web server with a Wifi adapter that's dual-ported to the flash memory and can read it while the parent device also has it mounted. (It's actually a little more of a headscratcher how *writing* files to it works over wireless if the filesystem is mounted; it seems like that's not something that's normally done in the "I have it plugged into my Camera" use case...)

The device *does* also support iSDIO, however... in fact, it supports all sorts of crazy things according to the developer's forum, including a GPIO mode! Honestly I kind of suspect that it *would* be within the realm of possibility to integrate one with something like the SCSI2SD. It *seems* like it still does rely on having its own configuration files, etc, stored in a FAT filesystem partition, but perhaps you could do something like modify the SCSI2SD firmware so it recognizes partition boundaries and puts the Mac volume at an offset from sector 0 so you can keep a FAT partition where the card expects it. Then I suppose it comes down to whether the API allows you to grab raw disk sectors off the storage volume. I don't actually see commands for that, but obviously I have no idea. *If* it allows that then in theory then all you'd need is a client side app to "mount" the Mac volume over HTTP. You could hack a userland HFS browser like HFSExplorer, or do something like a FUSE plugin.

 
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