Cheap IDE on scsi bus solution?

[ChunkyPanda03]

So I recently acquired a powerpc 8100/110 the hard drive soon broke but fortunately I had a 600 megabyte Drive. But of course with this was supposed to be a 2GB Drive and there is very little space to store anything. And I begin to look around and scsi drives are pretty expensive. But like every retro computer nerd I have a stack of IDE drives at my disposal.But of course there's no way to just slap a IDE drive into a SCSI bus. So I began to look at some I need you to SCSI bridge adapters. Now there are plenty and most of them that are listed are made by acard. But almost all of the bridge cards are extremely expensive to the point of being illogical. But some are $60 or around that price range, still this isn't a great deal. So I was wondering does anyone know of any affordable solutions to have an IDE work on a SCSI bus?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

You may be looking in the wrong direction. Though an IDE bridge is on my if ever I find one (and can afford it in the moment) GOTTAHAVEIT list it isn't the direction I'm going with for my Radius 81/110 project. If I weren't building the ultimate System 100 VidCap setup with striped UltraSCSI off my JackHammer in StudioArray Boxes I'd be looking in a third direction.

I'd definitely be going with the SCSI2SD V6(?) which appears to be out of sight on the Inertial Computing site along with the others being out stock ATM, The v5 flavors are great products from everything I've heard, but v6 supports Fast/Narrow SCSI II at approx twice the throughput using the same SD card solid state storage in ridiculous capacities for the 1995 timeframe. IIRC your 8100/110 should have an internal SCSI bus supporting this amazing product. Zero wait state SD on even the standard Narrow/SLOOOOOW Mac SCSI bus should put a bridged IDE HDD to shame. If memory serves it was a bit pricier at $99 as compared to the v5 flavor $50-$75 ranges, but likely a lot more capable in terms of performance than any bridged IDE solution I've ever seen.

Can anyone verify the faster internal SCSI bus of the 8100 series? Couldn't find info on that just now on either LEM or everymac and have never seen info on throughput for even the Quadra 950 internal bus.

 

[Cory5412]

I can't verify any 8100 SCSI information specifically, but I can add another recommendation for the SCSI2SD. I'm using a v6 on an 8600/300. Mine is configured incorrectly at the moment, it turns in much lower sequential transfer numbers than it really should, but the system is still reasonably sprightly for day-to-day navigation. (Mine, with the performance it currently gets) wouldn't stand up to video capture, however. For almost everything else, it should make your 8100 feel much faster.

One more thought, in terms of just "having enough space" - if you're running 7.5.5 plus updates or newer, you can use vtools. (or another file server, I'm eventually going to release the book I'm writing myself on how to set it up.)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Sweet, moving into technical writing to spice up your usual fictional fare? Doing both should keep things fresh on both aisles of the library for you. Best! []

 

[Cory5412]

I work IT help desk, so I am writing technical >40h/week. I (intermittently, admittedly) have had a tech-focused personal blog for the past ~15 years. The main purpose of The Book is to be a checklist and to explain the system for anyone interested in running one themselves.

I could get away with less, but it seemed like it would be neat to do.

I actually wish I spent more time on fiction writing (and reading) than I do. Given that much of my writing here ends up being factual/technical style writing, (perhaps not to an explicit styleguide, but) I spend a couple magnitudes more time doing nonfiction than fiction.

EDIT: Generic note, ASIP6 is fun but it's wildly overkill for most needs. I need to write or find-and-endorse some good documentation on different file sharing technologies. The configuration VTools is in is just where I landed when I looked at a variety of potential solutions and selected for:

• fun for me
  
• authenticity
  
• potentially easy to hand off to another person to run it
  
• reasonable to expand capacity
  
• security
  

The next best option was gonna be the terminating version of Windows SBS 2003-2005, or Windows Server 2003R2 with Sharepoint and Exchange. I also briefly considered Mac OS X Server, but elected to go the way I did for ease and security.

 

[Franklinstein]

I found a SCSI-to-IDE bridge for about $5 in a junk shop a while back. After looking it up for sale online it seems to go for about $100, so needless to say it's not cheap under normal circumstances. You're better off with the SCSI2SD setup because they'll both cost about the same while the SCSI2SD will be noticeably faster.

The 8100 does indeed have a secondary internal-only SCSI bus utilizing the NCR 53CF96 fast SCSI controller. It runs at 10MB/s, twice the performance of the primary SCSI controller. Pretty much every Mac with onboard SCSI used the slower 5MB/s controller, with some exceptions: most high-end Power Macs had two buses, the slow internal/external SCSI bus for the CDROM and whatnot and the fast internal bus for the hard drives, and there were also a few high-end 68k boxes (IIfx, a couple Quadras) that used fast SCSI.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Yep, that's what I thought. Once I get the v6 or a faster version by then I'll test it against a quartet of striped UltraSCSI rotary drives in the two StudioArray Boxes running off the Fast/Wide JackHammer SCSI II card with twice its throughput. I think know which I'll wind up using for VidCap and which I'll be wanting to keep in there as my boot disk without any need for that testing. But v6 (or better) will be snuggled like a bug in a rug in my pet IIfx though.  []

 

[joethezombie]

I absolutely love the SCSI2SD, but I think there is something wrong with the v6 cards.  I wrote to Micheal about the issue, and he was able to confirm my results, but sustained write speeds are severely lacking, even dropping to half the speed of a v5 card.  Check out these performance graphs.

First up, Here's the v6 card on my IIfx using the built-in SCSI solution.  Speed averages 1598 KB/s read, with a 850 KB/s write.  But note the severe drop-off at 60KB file size.  Yikes!  Drops the read speed down to 610 KB/s:



I thought the issue must be the sub-standard Apple solution, so I tossed in a Jackhammer.  Wow, check out those read speeds!  6054KB/s.  4x faster than stock.  But wowsers, the write speed again takes a pounding at 60KB file size:



And finally, a v5 card using the stock controller.  No degradation in the write speed.



I still need to try the v5 card with the Jackhammer and see the peak performance it can deliver.

But if your use case is writing files over 60KB or sustained writing, something is hosed.  I would be VERY interested in seeing results from other v6 owners.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I'll bet that's why it's out of sight on Inertial's site. OUCH!

 

[Cory5412]

Inertial sells them, they are probably out of stock right now.

Query: What SD card are you using in your V6? Even though they "can't make use of the speed" it's better to get the fastest card you can. I'm using a Samsung Evo something-or-other in mine.

I need to check with my friend who has one in a PC98 because he's gotten relatively good performance out of it, much better than mine.

The other thing I need to do, he and I did a little experiment and bought two different SD cards for my v6 and v5, I need to try the Sandisk card at some point. The one he recommended I use is a Sandisk Extreme card with A1 rating, which states "Speed up to 100MB/sec, 667X"

Of course, SCSI2SD won't actually go that fast, but the faster cards can clear their caches better, if I remember correctly.

EDIT: I've noted somewhere that I was disappointed with the throughput of the scsi2sd, I believe mine is misconfigured, not faulty, but it's still 1) better than no storage at all 2) reasonably sprightly even on 604ev/300 and g3/300 running OS 9+. It's just, not suitable for video capture, at least how I have mine configured now.

I'm running the MacBench 4 disk bench on it to get some more idea, numerically, what mine is currently performing like.

 

[Cory5412]

So I ran MacBench full disk suite on my 8600 while booted to this card. It's actually doing better in my 8600 than it did in my Beige.

I think I might still have something mis-configured, however, because they're lower than what my friend's PC98 returns.

Sequential Read:  (kilobytes/sec)

• 512: 164.60
  
• 1K: 288.36
  
• 32K: 4357.78
  
• 64K: 5588.96
  
• 128K: 6435.26
  
• 1024K: 7612.83
  

Random Read:

• 512: 147.98
  
• 1K: 245.02
  
• 32K: 4174.27
  
• 64K: 5443.16
  
• 128K: 6468.97
  
• 1024K: 7641.26
  

Sequential Write:

• 512: 1663.76
  
• 1K: 1957.88
  
• 32K: 1943.11
  
• 64K: 3197.33
  
• 128K: 3880.06
  
• 1024K: 4810.90
  

Random Write:

• 512: 131.72
  
• 1K: 255.96
  
• 32K: 2220.82
  
• 64K: 2952.06
  
• 128K: 3174.06
  
• 1024K: 3764.17
  

Here are my friend's PC98 results:

in DOS:



in Windows:



Notably, neither of us have the drop-off you experienced. It's worth noting, Both my friend and I are running the latest available firmware and we both bought relatively high end SD cards. I'm using a Samsung Evo and my friend was using a Sandisk of at least mid-grade variety. I'll post an update if they let me know which specific card it was.

EDIT: Friend's machine uses a SCSI card with an LSI53C875 chip. It's contemporary to Adaptec 2940/3940. 

EDIT 2:  Friend is using 16GB Sandisk Ultra. (Mine is a 32gb card.) There are higher end cards, I'll update this thread if Friend clones the system or does some benching with a higher end card and sends me the result.

EDIT 3: Friend put in a 32GB Sandisk Extreme. Note, his has been on firmware 6.1.3 (mine is on 6.2.1). This is with a fresh card, after imaging the entire setup over and restoring the configuration.

In DOS:



In Windows:



Note the reasonably high write speed for a 50MB file in both situations. Exchanging the Sandisk "Ultra" card for a Sandisk "Extreme" helped take that from around 3000 kilobytes per second to around 3700 kilobytes per second.

EDIT 4:

Friend updated the SCSI2SD v6 firmware in PC98 to 6.2.1 and then re-ran the tests, still on the Sandisk "Extreme" card.

DOS:



Windows:



Windows, but with 200MB write test (just to make sure the new write speed is consistent.)



So, that's a meaningful boost!

I don't know what data rates are needed for analog video capture setups, but suffice it to say this will be Fine(TM) for almost any other need, especially on any Mac where you have 10MB/sec SCSI but you don't have the ability to or room for something like a SATA or IDE card, as you might do in a PCI mac.

EDIT 5:

So my friend went back and put the old "ultra" card in with the updated firmware and got these results, this time I'm only going to post the Windows result because the most relevant number is the write speed.

Windows:



That's a fair improvement with a firmware update, but it's important to note that the higher grade "extreme" card does much better.

Friend tested 50, 100, and 200MB writes and they're reasonably consistent. The larger writes are slightly faster, overall, but still slower than the Extreme card was. Notably, doing a single full-effort 200 megabyte file write is kind of a niche task on a vintage Mac.

The number flashed on the "ultra" card is 80MB/sec and the number on the "Extreme" is 100MB/sec and we're not getting anywhere near either of these numbers, but depending on your workload, moving from 4 to 6 megabytes per second of sustained write speed.

If you're going to spend a hundred bucks on a SCSI2SD v6 -- and they're very nice devices -- you should spend the extra couple bucks to get the best possible SD card. Right now, that accounts for a $5 difference. On Sandisk's own US web page, the 32GB "Ultra" card is $10 and the 32GB "extreme" card is $15. There is an "Extreme Plus" card for $30 as well, which might make further difference. Neither of us has the Extreme Plus card at the moment, for testing.

@joethezombie I'm extremely interested in what card you have. I suspect that the issue is there, and not with your SCSI2SD in particular.

@ChunkyPanda03 the SCSI2SD v6 is very good for day-to-day work. These bigger cards, with system 7.6.1 or newer, will be no problem at all. I formatted my card using LaCie's disk formatting utilities, "silverlining" version 6.1. which I had on a Zip disk while booted to my OS install media. This way, I didn't ahve to mess around with configuring the disk to prtend to be a "real" SCSI disk. I set my volume at 31GB. I'm using 9.1 so I formatted it HFS+/Extended, but HFS Standard in 7.6.1 would work fine too, even though it's slightly inefficient. If you use 8.1, that might be the best mix of "has HFS+" and "runs well on the oldest PowerMacs"

If you don't have a Zip drive available, you should be able to do this using just a floppy diskette, the Zilverlining executable is a bit under 900kb.

I'm not getting quite as much out of my SCSI2SD as my friend is, for a couple different reasons.

Given all of this information, and at some point I intend to try this myself, for (again) everything short of video capture, a SCSI2SD v5 would probably also be fine in a PowerMac x100, even an 8100/110.

Hopefully this helps!

 

[joethezombie]

@Cory5412,

I'm using SanDisk Ultra microSDHC UHS-I (advertised with 533x 80MB/s).  I'm using this card in both the v5 and (with adapter) v6 SCSI2SDs.

Interesting note, when I sent the findings to Micheal, he also had similar results, sharing the graph showing the drop at 60KB on his LC475 running 7.5.3, albeit not nearly as severe as on my IIfx.  He theorized at that time that perhaps after 65536 bytes, it falls back to single-sector transfers.

In troubleshooting, I tried using both Apple_Driver and Apple_Driver43, but both exhibited the same slowdown.

I haven't yet attempted using a 3rd party driver, such as FWB, or an alternate benchmark.

I don't have any non-68K machines with SCSI adapters, so I can't really run any benchmarking on alternate hardware.  Oh, I guess I could try it in my A3000.

 

[Cory5412]

That's totally wild. That's the card my friend used and their initial results for big writes were reasonably good, even on the old firmware, and got better with updated firmware and a better card.

Anecdotally, my results with the LaCie formatter and leaving the properties for the card itself were way better than when I tried to make it pretend it was a "supported" Apple or Seagate drive and then use Apple's own formatter. That may or may not make a difference, I don't have time to test right now, but if you have some time, I'd consider picking up Silverlining 6.1 or an appropriate version and trying that.

One more note: My friend was testing in, of course, DOS and Windows 98, as pictured. My 8600 is running 9.1 (and of course I'm using HFS+ as the file system, and I made a 31gb partition) and my Beige G3 was running 9.2.2. As of my testing the other day, the 8600 has a couple gigs on its disk so it's not like I was testing the very beginning or end of the card.

I'll have to see about putting my v6 in the 840, 6100, or another older Mac and see what kinds of results I get. I don't happen to have any NuBus or PCI SCSI cards, so I can't speak to whether that's causing different results. Because, like... your are all half or less what mine are, and I am using one of the onboard buses in the 8600 (I forgot which one though, to be perfectly honest.)

I'll see when I have time to back up all the data on the 8600 and move it away and put the device in a different Mac and do some more benchmarking. The 840av is likely to be the "best" comparison to both a IIfx+Jackhammer and a 475.

For completeness, what OS were you running at the time? I can and likely will try the original 7.1, 7.6.1, and 8.1 on my 840av. I have a 6100/60, on that system I'll likely try 7.6.1 and 8.1, and perhaps 9.1.

 

[johnklos]

You're better off with the SCSI2SD setup because they'll both cost about the same while the SCSI2SD will be noticeably faster.

Actually, you have that backwards. The SCSI2SD will likely be faster than most old SCSI drives, but any modern-ish IDE or SATA drive will be worlds faster than a SCSI2SD.

I have several ACARD SCSI-IDE adapters with IDE-SATA adapters in all sorts of various machines. They'll do an honest 80 to 90 MB/sec with an SSD on a 160 MB/sec U2W SCSI bus (tested in an Alpha-based API CS20). The 50 pin SCSI models like the AEC-7720U will saturate a 10 MB/sec SCSI bus easily with any decent IDE disk.

A SCSI2SD is fine, in my opinion, for systems that don't require tons of speed and which can benefit from external access (swapping SD cards, connecting SCSI2SD to USB to another computer), but if you can find a less expensive ACARD on eBay, that'd be preferable for speed.

 

[Gorgonops]

but if you can find a less expensive ACARD on eBay, that'd be preferable for speed

A quick look at eBay shows the only ACARDs for less than crazy money are a few of the kind-of-awkward-for-most-Macs LVD 68 pin models. If you have the necessary adapters lying around I guess that's "comparable" to the SCSI2SD if you have the necessary bits lying around, but... alas, finding a "cheap" ACARD is kind of like winning the lottery.

 

[johnklos]

You're not wrong, Gorgonops, about 68 pin adapters being more awkward, but sometimes they're advantageous because 68 pin cables are easier to route.

A quick look on eBay show lots of SCSI 68 pin to 50 pin adapters for $12 to $14 USD. There are even the very short ones which are small enough to be used in a Quadra 605:

eBay 68 pin female 50 pin female

A 68 pin cable with a terminator at the end costs less than $20. 68 pin ACARD can be had for around $70. So, for around $100 to $110, you can have a solution which will let you use any IDE drive, or with an IDE-SATA adapter for another $10, with any SATA drive. Considering how cheap SSDs are these days, you've got lots of good options.

 

[Gorgonops]

I used to have an 80 pin SCA drive plus the requisite adapter in my Q650 and I thought that was irritating, so I start to wince at the idea of having to stack thing after thing after thing... but, sure, if you need the performance it's certainly an option.

My general take on it would be that for $60 plus maybe $15 for a SD card that's larger than practically any native 50 pin drive ever made the value of the SCSI2SD is pretty unbeatable for casual retro-computing tasks. There certainly still *are* people out there playing with capturing video or compiling UNIX distributions on these machines, but I doubt it's a significant percentage.

 

[Cory5412]

Video is the only use case I can think of where it would be particularly compelling to go with a faster IDE drive over a SCSI2SD.

That said, if you're looking into 68/80/SCA adapters anyway, and spending money on that, and you don't need or want the zero-seek advantages of a SCSI2SD, then, it'll probably cost less to just use one of those newer/faster SCSI disks rather than even bothering to find an IDE adapter.

But, again, this discussion is largely only relevant to the slim group of Macs fast enough to be doing work that benefits from higher sequential write performance and not have a PCI slot or reasonable onboard IDE controller. Basically: the X100 power Macs and perhaps the IIfx/950/800/840 depending on what stuff you've got put into them.

And, as Gorgonops says, only if you're actually doing that work.

I've got the SCSI2SD in my 8600 because I happened to have the SCSI2SD laying around, but truthfully if I was capturing video with my 8600, I'd pop in a SATA or IDE card, not bother with an adapter to one of its onboard SCSI buses.

EDIT: yeah, I just looked, if you're buying cabling for under $20, another $20 and you can get a reasonably good hard disk for day-to-day stuff, a couple more dollars and you can get disks that were probably part of late SCSI era workstations and servers. That's admittedly cheaper than a SCSI2SD. It'll be faster than what was stock. I think it'll fall down to either a preference to save a few bucks now versus having to deal with that supply of disks dwindling in the future, and aesthetic issues like whether or not you care in particular about "feeling" things such as hard disk sound.

 

[trag]

There should be a fair number of Acard 7720U SCSI/IDE adapters amongst list members.   I sold something like 35 of them here several years ago.  Of course, at the time, there was a guy on Ebay with apparently unlimited numbers selling them for about $30 + shipping.