Franklinstein
Well-known member
Some people may be familiar with ATA disk-on-module drives, which are basically anywhere from about 1-32GB of fixed storage in a module that plugs directly into an ATA header. There are no flash cards, no USB connectors, no configuration software, no nothing: plug it in and presto! You have a disk drive ready to go. Does anybody know of a DOM-type drive for SCSI? I did a little searching and while I did find a handful of SCSI flash drives, most seemed to either be variations of SCSI2SD or they were a little vague with "call for pricing/availability" on some of the websites, which means either it's at least as expensive as a SCSI2SD solution and/or they're not available without ordering half a million of them.
While I do appreciate the versatility and available features of SCSI2SD and other projects, in most cases I don't need it. At all. Also, >$100 plus the cost of the flash card is a little steep if all I want is a boot drive for an SE, a system that would be more than happy with under 1GB of storage. And it's not as if I'd be shuttling the drive around between machines: once it goes into a PB 550c or a Color Classic, it's staying there forever, so there's no need for the ability to swap cards and fiddle with virtual disks or anything.
So yeah: do any exist, and if not, is there interest in having something made? I figure four flavors (512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB) would be adequate and cover pretty much the whole spread of machines that would benefit from such a drive (if you have a PCI-based Mac most chances are you'd probably prefer using a SATA or ATA card for mass storage, and if you need more than 4GB a SCSI2SD may be more cost effective anyway). Having a single 2.5" form factor would mean it would slot into either a PB directly or into a desktop with an adapter. It would be fully plug-and-play: install it and the system sees the full capacity of the disk straight away, no pre-configuration required. Ideally prices would range from about $30-80 or thereabouts depending on capacity and also possibly upon what type of flash is used (I'd prefer the long-life NAND stuff over cheap SD card flash, especially if a *nix or VM were used).
While I do appreciate the versatility and available features of SCSI2SD and other projects, in most cases I don't need it. At all. Also, >$100 plus the cost of the flash card is a little steep if all I want is a boot drive for an SE, a system that would be more than happy with under 1GB of storage. And it's not as if I'd be shuttling the drive around between machines: once it goes into a PB 550c or a Color Classic, it's staying there forever, so there's no need for the ability to swap cards and fiddle with virtual disks or anything.
So yeah: do any exist, and if not, is there interest in having something made? I figure four flavors (512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB) would be adequate and cover pretty much the whole spread of machines that would benefit from such a drive (if you have a PCI-based Mac most chances are you'd probably prefer using a SATA or ATA card for mass storage, and if you need more than 4GB a SCSI2SD may be more cost effective anyway). Having a single 2.5" form factor would mean it would slot into either a PB directly or into a desktop with an adapter. It would be fully plug-and-play: install it and the system sees the full capacity of the disk straight away, no pre-configuration required. Ideally prices would range from about $30-80 or thereabouts depending on capacity and also possibly upon what type of flash is used (I'd prefer the long-life NAND stuff over cheap SD card flash, especially if a *nix or VM were used).