Sourcing 3.5" 50 PIN SCSI SSD

[zebity]

Hi 68Kers,

is anyone aware of where you can source 3.5" 50 PIN SCSI SSD drives as an alternative to using old (and unreliable) SCSI drives?

I have found a number of sites which have details on drives but there are no costs and web searching does not appear to bring up any retail outlets.

Here are companies with 50 PIN SCSI SSDs, I have found:

Hagiwara Sys-Com

Red Rock

Menkor

If they there is not a "retail" option, I would be interested in seeing here are enough 68Kers to allow an order of some bulk number of drives (to get a reasonable price).

Thoughts...

Currently I am working on reviving an SE/30 (with recap and IIfx ROM) and Colour Classic (with 575 Board)

Cheers,

Zebity

(SE/30, Colour Classic, Mac Pro, Mac mini(s) and MacBook Pro)

 

[johnklos]

If they there is not a "retail" option, I would be interested in seeing here are enough 68Kers to allow an order of some bulk number of drives (to get a reasonable price).

I don't know what you'd consider a reasonable price, but those SCSI SSD are not going to be cheap. Any time you try to make something which you'll only sell in the dozens or hundreds, they're going to cost a lot.

What'd be much cheaper if you must have an SSD (instead of a CF card, for instance) is to get an Acard SCSI-SATA adapter:

http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?idno_no=249&prod_no=ARS-2000SUP&type1_title=SCSIDE%20II%20Bridge&type1_idno=11

for about $200 USD, then buy any SATA SSD you want, such as:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227738

At least you'd always be able to put any newer, higher capacity drive in there at a later time. The proprietary SCSI SSD is a one shot deal that's obviously not expandable.

 

[Bunsen]

Another option is to order a CF AztecMonster when the maker gets around to another batch, and using a CF card. If your Mac/s have PCI slots, there are IDE/ATA and SATA cards available.

You might also like to take a look at our wiki article, SCSI Drive Replacement Options.

 

[johnklos]

I'm not sure how much the CF AztecMonster costs, but another option is one of these:

http://a4000t.com/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=65_79

It's $72 USD with a 2 gig CF card and a CF adapter, which is pretty good. The CF AztecMonster looks nice for those places where space is very important, but I'm guessing it costs more than $72 (although I'd be VERY happy if I were wrong).

This device allows multiple cards to be used simultaneously (the CF adapter is necessary because most computers want to boot from LUN 0 which is the PCMCIA slot). Not sure how Macs handle multiple LUNs, but on my VAXstation I use the other slots for other flash memory, so this device gives me very easy ways to move data.

Personally, the whole long thread about speeds of this versus that isn't that meaningful to me. I saw very small differences between a not very quick CF card and a 7200 RPM 250 gig SATA drive on my 40 MHz Quadra 605, but nothing big enough that I'd ever prefer one over the other for any reasons other than convenience. On an m68030 machine, I wouldn't even think twice - anything you use is always going to be faster than the SCSI bus on Macs.

 

[zebity]

68kers,

thanks very much for thoughts and references.

I think I will try out SCSI to IDE or SATA option.

Given that SCSI is parallel, it would seem that IDE is a better option, as it would be easier to convert.

The various benchmark results seem inconclusive, so once I get my Mac up and running with converter I will report back.

Cheers,

Zebity

(SE/30, Colour Classic, Mac Pro, Mac mini(s) and MacBook Pro)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Serial to 8-bit parallel and the reverse ought to be trivial. There have been Discrete Component Shift Registers to do such conversions since way back in the TTL Cookbook day. Such logic must be very advance by now, and is likely implemented in many of today's tiny Microprocessor kits. I haven't played with this stuff for over 20 years, but I can't imagine serial to parallel should be a consideration.

jonklos, thanks for that link! Pardon my curiosity, but what's the acronym LUN & how might it be problematic for the 68k Mac OS?

 

[johnklos]

The only thing that matters with regards to SATA versus IDE is that the older IDE adapters are generally cheaper (and possibly that the newer SATA-SCSI might support drives larger than 2 terabytes - the SCSI-IDE don't). If space isn't an issue, I'd suggest getting a SCSI-IDE adapter and a $12 SATA-IDE adapter if you want to connect SATA.

Speedwise, SATA-SCSI would much more likely be faster than IDE-SCSI because SATA's minimum speed is still faster than the highest speed of most IDE, so if there was even a infinitesimally measurable amount of latency, it'd be less for SATA. But that latency would never be measurable on any kind of SCSI that would ever be available from any m68k machine.

LUN stands for Logical Unit Number. SCSI was a pretty smart protocol for its day (it still is in certain respects) and the standard allowed for eight devices (including the SCSI controller itself) on an 8 bit wide bus, but each device could have a number of individually addressable parts. Some SCSI CD changers used LUNs to select different CDs, some tape libraries use LUNs to select different tapes, and so on. That SCSI card reader uses LUNs to have five different disks all accessible from one SCSI ID.

When machines don't support selecting multiple LUNs (and I'm just talking about booting here - most OSes support multiple LUNs just fine), whatever is at LUN 0 would end up being the thing that can be seen, which is why CompactFlash card is more often put into the PCMCIA slot with the adapter so that it's at LUN 0 and can be used to boot a system.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Thanks, john, sometimes it's a lot better to have somebody knowledgeable explain such an acronym in layman's terms, than it is to google the crap outta something simple. That way everybody who reads the thread can understand what's being talked about.

It's important do do one's own research on many subjects, but acronyms are an entirely different kettle of fish.

SCSI was/is an awesome, well documented standard, generic Small Computer (MiniComputer in the original case) Systems Interface that can basically do ANYTHING the mind can imagine to connect computers together or connect peripherals of any kind to computers a/o to each other!

 

[Bunsen]

I do seem to recall a millenium ago, noticing one of those SCSI multicard readers that had each slot as a separate SCSI ID, not as LUNs. I'll see if I can hunt down any further info.

 

[zebity]

Hi M68KLAers,

I got myself one of the ACARD SCSI-to-SATA boxes and installed a 2.5" SDD into it, but now it seems that my machine does not recognise it.

On both my SE/30 and Mystic Colour Classic the SCSI drives has the old "terminator" resisters sets install.

All new SCSI devices use jumpers instead.

The ACARD box has two jumpers for SCSI terminator:

1. Terminator Enable

2. Terminator Power Enable

I would expect that for SE/30 that I would configure:

a. Terminator Enabled &

b. Terminator Power Disabled (as SE/30 SCSI provides termination power).

However my SE/30 does not recognise the device... (using "Apple HD SC Setup 7.3.5").

I then did a check on all the options and still found I was unable to get the device initialised.

It this due to limits with the apple software that means that it will only recognise SCSI devices from certain manufacturers?

Also will "Apple HD SC Setup" fail in the device is to large?

Thanks,

(SE/30, Colour Classic (Mystic), Mac Pro, Mac mini(s) and MacBook Pro)

 

[johnklos]

Is the device seen on the SCSI bus, and the problem is just that Apple HD SC Setup won't work with it? If so, you can get the universal Apple HD SC Setup which is modified to work with any drive.

If the problem is that the device isn't seen on the SCSI bus, try enabling terminator SCSI power (which is only ever possibly a problem if you're powering termination in several places using different power supplies).

Apple HD SC Setup won't fail on large drives (I've used drives larger than 1 TB), but it will take AGES. It might take as long as an hour per partition on an SE/30. I can't say for sure, but even a 750 gig drive on a 50 MHz m68040 can take five minutes per partition operation.

 

[Bunsen]

Two other SCSI utilities which are useful to have are Lido and SCSI Probe. Lido can format just about anything.

 

[zebity]

Hi johnklas & Bunsen,

thanks for info.

I did some further reading and as per your comments the Mac will not recognise all scsi drives ...

I have a bit a of chicken and egg problem...

I do not have an external disk enclosure and so to format the drive I need to disconnect the internal drive and connect new drive and then boot from floppy (using Network Access 7.5.3 disk).

I removed all the network stuff and put SCSI Probe on the floppy and it shows the ACARD SCSI device.

I initially tried to format with "ResEdited" standard Setup HD tool (change "00" to "FF") and had no luck.

I then tried to put the A/UX HD Setup version on the floppy, but it is too large (even when I removed everything), ditto Lido....

I will try to see if I can create a Mac OS 6 boot floppy and run tools from that.

Cheers.

(SE/30, Colour Classic (Mystic), Mac Pro, Mac mini(s) and MacBook Pro)

 

[johnklos]

Do you have another machine you could use? Or failing that, do you have a Mac OS X (or other BSD) or GNU/Linux machine to which you could temporarily connect the SATA drive? If so, I could probably upload an image you could dd to the drive.

 

[zebity]

Hi Johnklas,

thanks for the offer, I do have another mac, but putting the 2 1/2 inch drive would not be easy...

I created a boot floppy with "minisubstitute" finder and run Lido from the floppy.

Lido came up with an error indicating that it could not get the disk size and then reported a "Phase Error".

I have two disk a 160GB SSD and an 320 GB regular drive. I got the same error message from both drives.

I think that the bridge has limitations on the disk size, as I read the specs and they indicate that the device "supports a SATA hard drive of 1.5G/3.0G", which is way smaller than current drives on the market.

I think I will contact ACARD tech support as a 1.5/3.0 GB drive limi, would make this device completely useless,

Cheers,

Zebity

(SE/30, Colour Classic (Mystic), Mac Pro, Mac mini(s) and MacBook Pro)

 

[waynestewart]

I think that the bridge has limitations on the disk size, as I read the specs and they indicate that the device "supports a SATA hard drive of 1.5G/3.0G", which is way smaller than current drives on the market.

If you check again, I think you'll find that they are talking about 1.5/3.0 Gps which is a speed rating of 1.5/3.0 Gigabits per second also called SATA I and SATA II. Except for SSDs, I don't think they ever made a SATA drive under 40gb.

 

[johnklos]

Those adapters can go up to at least 2 TB. The 1.5/3 stuff you saw is Gbps - speed, not capacity.

If your newer Mac only has IDE, get an IDE-SATA adapter so you can get data onto the drive first, then move the drive back.

 

[zebity]

Hi Johnklos,

I put the SSD into a USB/SATA case and then partitioned it using Linux Gpartd with hfsutils to create 2 x 2G HFS Partitions on drive.

I then created a 1GB HFS drive image via M68K DiskCopy using Basilisk II (emulator) and copied System 7.5.3 into this.

In creating the HFS image, it comes up with a number of options on whether to create a partition table, MBR etc. I selected the "No Boot Record" (or equivalent) option, which I assume means I will end up with a straight serial byte stream, that I can then use to do a Unix DD copy onto one of the 2G partitions on the drive.

NOTE: I was not able to create a 2GB image as it resulted in a complaint about there not being enough disk space (even though I have nearly 1TB of free disk...).

To copy the image onto disk I presume I just do dd in= out=/dev/

Unfortunately in the mean time I seem to have broken my SE/30 when I pulled it apart to do some case surgery so I could fit in 16MB RAM modules (the SIMMs where just touching pressed metal ridge which means I needed to do some metal work....), so am not going to do more testing until I get this resolved,

Cheers,

Zebity

(SE/30, Colour Classic (Mystic), Mac Pro, Mac mini(s) and MacBook Pro)

 

[zebity]

M68KLAers,

I have had to contact ACARD, as it appears that there a compatibility issue with the ARS-2000SUP and Mac SE/30 SCSI controller...

ACARD requested me to reflash the device to lastest firmware, which I did via PC with Adaptec card and I am still having problems with Mac.

I get same message about not being able to get Drive Capacity & Phase Error even with new firmware.

I am wondering if the problem may be that the ACARD box is trying to run Ultra SE SCSI (20MB/sec) , and not falling back to slow standard SCSI (5MB/sec) that Mac SE/30 uses.... just guessing.

Unfortunately the device does not provide any jumper to force using lower speed SCSI.

Until I get resolution on this I would advise to avoid the ACARD box with SE/30. I have put a further request for solution back to ACARD after the firmware update did not fix the problem.

Cheers,

Zebity

(SE/30, Colour Classic (Mystic), Mac Pro, Mac mini(s) and MacBook Pro)