CF AztecMonsters have landed

[uniserver]

ok ive seen 500mb SCSI drives on eaby for 20 bucks, how much are these? i saw one on ebay for 129.00 i said to my self that cant be right , no way. some one would pay 129.00 for something like this.

price has to be factored in, i'm to the point if a vintage mac does not come with a working HD, i will not bid,

hard drives are not easy to find and cost more then the machine in most cases…

 

[sirwiggum]

The Plus never had an HDD.

Though it does boot off 800k floppy and I'm hoping to use a SCSI ZIP drive at some point.

 

[uniserver]

yes i've used scsi zip as a boot drive it works quite well!

almost as fast as a slow hard drive

 

[pl212]

it should work just fine with a Plus as well.

So actually on the 3.5" CF AztecMonster there's a special note in the manual:

Mac Plus does not boot from this card normally. You must cut #40pin RST fuction from flat cable. CF card volume is recommended under 2GB.

 

[krye]

I too can't believe that these things are $129! Technology is cheap, why so expensive? Is it because some guy is making these in his garage?

Eventually, and I mean like 20 years from now, do you know how impossible it's going be to get your hands on a working 50 pin SCSI drive? I needed a new drive for my Classic the other day and the cheapest one I could find on eBay was $22 bucks! Why are these things not $5 a pop? I can't believe people are charging upwards of $100-$150 dollars for a 200MB hard drive. I want my Classic Macs to last forever. I want my kids to enjoy them when they're my age. Eventually, all the hard drives are going to die. It would be great to replace all the drives with CF cards, but not at $129 a pop.

 

[LOOM]

I'm not sure, but I think someone said somewhere that this is just a guy in Japan developing on his own and had them made in China or something.. I'm pretty sure it costs a lot to produce these niche cards. Who would buy these cards if you don't want them for some vintage amiga/mac SCSI-1 project?

Some years ago a big manufacturer made SCSI->IDE converters, mass produced them and sold them for $80 or something.. I can understand the $129 price

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

That'd be ACARD, ISTR their adapters costing more than $80, so I never got one for hobby purposes.

p. 4 post: if mr. Sakai is using the ACARD ASIC, he's probably paying a pretty penny for them.

The only reason technology seems cheap would be the quantities of scale achievable in production for mass markets. Technology for niche markets, as opposed to the consumer market, is still quite expensive.

These cards are too expensive for my hobby budget, but U160 HDDs and adapters are working quite nicely. Even used, U160 drives will probably be working in 20 years and they're almost obscenely inexpensive by comparison.

Whatever the market will bear is whatever will be charged.

 

[trag]

I'm not going to go through it again, but if you search up my explanation of why the Artmix SE/30 PDS passthrough/Daystar adapter is so expensive, that explanation applies to this device just as well.

But the earlier explanations are essentially correct. It's the small quantities. It's hard to build and sell anything for under $100 when the quantities are in the dozens or hundreds without giving away your time for free.

 

[register]

I would agree that the price Artmix asks for his CF-SCSI adapter is quite fair. Compared to the original price I paid for a PowerBook harddisk it is cheap. A 500 MB drive in 2.5" form factor came in the price region of USD 500…1.000 in the early 1990s. In fact, a long lasting 100 dollar replacement for such device is a bargain, as long as you do not look for the dollars per MB of storage. Of course it is a pity that old technology does barely benefit from current storage prices. At least we still have an option while other similar products reach end of production one by one.

 

[billynomates]

This is all very interesting. I have to say the price wasn't that bad. Anyway, some really good information here. I've taken delivery of my Aztec Monster and installed it in an SE/30. It seems that the hardware's okay. I can format and mount a 1GB CF card with HD Speed Tools 3.3, but after copying a blessed system folder over, I can't boot. I get a sad mac indicating the partition map is bad.

I've tried this same process a number of times, and each time it's the same result.

I can also format the CF using patched HD 7.5.3 setup, although this is unusable, with any writes (including the one to name the device post formatting) causing bus / address errors. Often I have to power cycle the machine to get control back. Occasionally I'll have to (debian linux) gparted the CompactFlash disk clean, before it will be recognised again.

Performance when copying files to or from the CF 'feels' quicker - for example, the time spent on each cycle of read/write when copying using the finder is significantly lower on the CF phase. I'll aim to get some stats from a stock SE/30 once I can boot from the compact flash.

I'm using 7.5.3 or 7.5.5 (preferably).

Any ideas, or general advice you could share?

Thanks.

 

[tt]

It seems some cards are easier to format than others. You could try another formatting utility, such as Anubis by CharisMac. After formatting check to make sure write errors are not happening with a disk utility like Norton before committing to thinking the process is completed. Are you running internally? If the termination is active via jumper, it will not boot on my machine.

 

[billynomates]

The terminator is not set - the jumper is not there. I've also tried a range of SCSI ids, and a couple of different cards - this one (1GB) and a 32MB one, with no luck. I'll try the anubis software - thanks.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'm not going to go through it again, but if you search up my explanation of why the Artmix SE/30 PDS passthrough/Daystar adapter is so expensive, that explanation applies to this device just as well.

As I understand it the Artmix board is insanely expensive due to the fact that's not just a slot expansion device, the PAL converts one of the two slots to a IIci Cache Slot. for accelerators. It is also quite large.

I think we can probably come up with a simplified, straight thru multiple slot, PDS expansion adapter. That'd be a boon to those lacking a PowerCache accelerator who don't wish to mutila . . . erm . . . do the WrongAnglePDSpassthruHack™ to several rare PDS cards.

 

[tt]

4-layer boards per square inch are very expensive for prototype runs. We need some kind of kickstarter for these kind of projects.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

The Artmix board appears to be two sided from the highres pics I have on file. The size of the thing cut down to just a PDS bus slot multiplier would still be a consideration for two sided protoboards.

trag, got linkage to your explanation?

 

[billynomates]

Very strange - the anubis software works, in that I can format the drive and copy the driver on to it, but again, when I try and boot I get a sad mac, and the codes indicating there's no partition map.

Also the formatting / driver writing process seems a little flaky. Occasionally I'll get a bus/address type error, and I'll have to start again. Terminated / unterminated and on the internal or external SCSI (mounted in a CD300 enclosure) seems to make no difference.

I've not low-level formatted these CFs... as, to tell the truth, I can't find the options to let me do that in the Anubis or HD SpeedTools software..! Perhaps it's something to do with terminology, and I'm looking for the wrong thing. I'm wondering if that's the problem, or if it's something to do with the SE/30 itself. It's been re-capped, and has been happily running A/UX for some years without too many issues.

If anyone needs any pictures, I can certainly help out there while it's out of my mac... What do you need specifically?

 

[tt]

Hmm... how many partitions? Did you do a clean system install or copy? One time I had to re-bless using System Picker instead of dragging sys files since I had two partitions and multiple system folders, and somehow the boot disk setting got thrown off. Maybe try System Picker and after try a new system install. With Anubis make sure blind writes is disabled for the drivers.

 

[billynomates]

Only the one partition, and just a copied system folder from an older SCSI disk with a 7.5.3 and a 7.5.5 system folder on it.

The folder is copied over un-blessed, and then blessed on the CF.

The computer shows a happy mac (for less than a second) before playing the chimes of doom.

Thanks for the suggestion - I think I'll try a clean install, as if I don't copy the system folder onto the CF, I just get a flashing question mark when trying to boot from the CF, which I would have thought is a good thing from a driver point of view!?

 

[billynomates]

Still no cigar. A clean installation gets 'An error occurred while trying to complete the installation. Installation was cancelled, leaving your disk untouched.' after some minutes. It doesn't matter if I do a quick install or a custom install (with only the System Software).

It goes through the installation until 'Reading Apple Guide: Shortcuts', where it says 'closing files', and looks like it's finishing the installation - but mighty quickly. Then the above error pops up.

There's nothing on the CF when I checked it. The activity light does flash occasionally (can't tell if it's reads or writes), and I can copy stuff to and fro to my hearts desire, using the hfs that the Anubis software installs. If I leave a System Folder on the CF when I install, the installer recognises it (with appropriate version / upgrade messages), and won't allow me to use the disk.

I've tried another Crucial 128M card. Same results.

Blind writes are disabled for both. And I've tried with a range of SCSI ids, internal / external enclosure, and termination.

 

[register]

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