Recommendations for reliable storage?

[dv-]

So, most of my vintage macs have SD or CF based storage. Generally it works, but I have noticed that sometimes it gets a little squirrel-ey. (My BlueSCSI SD cards all seem to need regular reformatting, for example.)

Today, on a lark, I tried capturing a VHS cassette using the built in AV card on my 6360. It's "hard drive" is a 64GB CF card with an IDE adapter. It does general computing tasks just fine - I hadn't had a problem with it before today. The capture worked for a while, but after a while the CF card just... seized up? A reboot didn't work; I had to actually power the machine off before it would come back. The trash can had a 1.9GB recovered file, and a second 4k one, so I assume the freeze occurred when trying to start the second segment of the video file.

I have much better (and more modern) hardware for doing that kind of thing, naturally. I just remember being able to do this sort of work with these machines back in the day. So... any tips for making these retromod storage devices usable for more than demos and the occasional round of Crystal Quest?

 

[Unknown_K]

An external SCSI drive or an Iomega Jazz depending on the bitrate. Just depends how much money you want to spend.

For Around $112 plus shipping you can buy a Medea VideoRaid on eBay that is SCSI with 4 internal 40+GB IDE drives in hardware RAID that will work find with AVID systems let alone built in Apple capture cards.

Item: 286854412211
Item: 286854407487

 

[Byrd]

Hi.

I know what you mean, I've not encountered it on Mac SD/CF devices, but some of my DOS solid state devices I need to format relatively often.

The answer would be to try brand new, high quality cards (I've often hit the jackpot here looking for locally sold private seller CF, SD cards on eBay) and/or a late 68pin spinning rust drive with 50 pin adapter for "serious" work

 

[lobust]

Try out a Zuluscsi instead and see if you have the same problems. I have been using them since the scsi2sd and they have been 100% reliable. I have about half a dozen of them in various macs.

Bluescsi v1 in particular is a flawed device with known issues. If your bluescsi's are v1, then very likely that's the root of your problems.
The v2 fixes them, but the unscrupulous behaviour of the developer around the release of the v2 means I won't ever touch them.

No doubt the quality of the SD card used plays a role. I use Sandisk Ultra cards and am picky about where I buy them from as counterfeits are widespread, including on Amazon.

For heavy IO like your video capture, it's important to remember that things like that were somewhat flaky even at the time on contemporary hardware. Lots of bugs and shortcomings existed on apples various IDE controllers at the time, and HFS is not a super robust filesystem

Apple didn't really have IDE fully figured out until the later G3s, and most people doing things like video capture even semi-seriously were probably not using the onboard IDE for that.

I have used IDE replacements in a couple of G4s - I set my Cube up with a CF card and IDE adapter, and it is pretty flaky. I had a pretty good amount of trouble getting it to work in the first place. On the other hand, I put a m.2-IDE enclosure in my TiBook and it seems to work great.