Looking to replace the hard drive in my slab with a compact flash card or something else modern, and have noticed that the price of the ACARD 7720U (mentioned in this thread:
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1616) is now over $250 on ebay, up from $35 mentioned in the thread. Could anyone recommend a different piece of hardware that is not so expensive?
yes, this is the right one. just make sure you'll get it with the right firmware installed! the best working version (for black hardware) is V 3.86.
Great, I ordered one. I sent him a message specifying wanting 3.86 firmware. Hopefully that gets through.
I just found this:
http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SDHe is selling complete boards for $75. I went ahead and ordered one. I'll report back on how it works.
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Brian
nice find! had to order one, too :P looks very promising, and the price seems very fair.
Quote from: "mikeboss"nice find! had to order one, too :P looks very promising, and the price seems very fair.
On the other hand, it only implements asynchronous transfers, and the performance appears ... less than stellar (
http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD#Performance):
QuoteAs currently implemented:
Sequential read: 930kb/sec Sequential write: 900kb/sec
(I'm presuming that this means '930 kilobytes per second' and not 'kilobits per second'.)
Compare this to the CF AztecMonster (
http://www.artmix.com/CF_AztecMonster.html), which offers write speeds of up to 5 MB/s (megabytes per second), and read speeds in excess of 15 MB/s – performance on average an order of magnitude better.
So for about twice as much money (the CF AztecMonster is $129, the SCSI2SD is AUS$75 which is about US$67) you get 10-ish times the speed. And for the same $129 you can get (
http://www.ebay.com/itm/301093674269) the AztecMonster II (
http://www.artmix.com/SATA_SCSI_AZMN_II_1.html) which lets you connect a SATA disk (including SSDs) and which offers more than 10 and up to almost 20 MB/s read and write, sustained, with big enough transactions.
That is quite true, however when comparing the performance of these to a vintage drive I think these will still have the advantage in most cases (including heat and power consumption). Total cost on this is probably only $30 more than getting a vintage drive after shipping which make it appealing for those shopping on price.
Quote from: "mikeboss"yes, this is the right one. just make sure you'll get it with the right firmware installed! the best working version (for black hardware) is V 3.86.
Out of curiosity, do you know what in particular this fixes? Is there an easy way to upgrade the firmware? Have a 3.5" and 2.5" from ArtMix and would like to bring them both up-to-date...
thanks!
I keep hopping someone will offer something in the $50-$70 range... perhaps in kit form. Modern embedded controller should be fast enough to emulate most of SCSI. For example:
http://micha.freeshell.org/ramdisk/index.php
Quote from: "barcher174"I just found this:
http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=SCSI2SD
He is selling complete boards for $75. I went ahead and ordered one. I'll report back on how it works.
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Brian
brian, did you get your SCSI2SD already? I received mine today, but it seems like this one's not compatible with black hardware. during boot I can see that the board is recognized but the cube just hangs at this stage...
will check now if it works properly with a 68k macintosh.
EDIT: the SCSI2SD adapter seems to work flawless in an LC-475
regards,
michael
Quote from: "pl212"Quote from: "mikeboss"yes, this is the right one. just make sure you'll get it with the right firmware installed! the best working version (for black hardware) is V 3.86.
Out of curiosity, do you know what in particular this fixes? Is there an easy way to upgrade the firmware? Have a 3.5" and 2.5" from ArtMix and would like to bring them both up-to-date...
thanks!
AFAIR with V 3.7 I got an error during boot but otherwise it'll work just fine. see this thread ->
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3019
I did get my SCSI2SD adapter, but also have not been able to get it to work. I tried a combination of every firmware option, but could only get it so far as printing the device label and then a hang. When I get time, I'll dig into the source and see if I can find any obvious red flags.
EDIT: If you look here you can see that there are hooks to capture what SCSI command it's failing at:
http://www.codesrc.com/gitweb/index.cgi?p=SCSI2SD.git;a=blob;f=software/SCSI2SD/SCSI2SD.cydsn/scsi.h;h=fe169544145de6a2ae4997c8bde1e8dbfc43af05;hb=6c8cbf54c6bd50fe5304d3616d8e8296d6968019--
Brian
Looks like there was a new firmware released which resolved the hang on boot issue. I've gotten a card to be recognized in nextstep, but still need to work on a disktab to make it bootable.
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Brian
I have a NS Color Turbo booting from this card now. Performance feels snappier than a standard HDD. This may be a good cheap option going forward. I used the --apple option and limited the drive size to 1.8GB.
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Brian
brian,
what options did you set on the SCSI2SD? my cube now boots from an external device, but when I try to install NeXTSTEP the cube just freezes. plus, during boot I'm getting this error:
sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED
sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED
sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED
sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED
sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED
sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED
sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED
what's really nice about the SCSI2SD is the possibility to set the VENDOR/PRODUCT-ID! this should eliminate the necessity to edit the disktab in NeXTSTEP 1.x.
I also see those messages, but everything seems to work OK. I used the diskbuilder app to install nextstep. It failed initially with a console message about the cylinder per block being incorrect. What I ended up doing was renaming newfs to newfs_new and then creating a script called newfs which called the old binary with the "-c 7" option. I will try in a cube and see if there are any issues later this week.
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Brian
no matter what I try, NeXTSTEP 1.0a keeps panicking. tried it with --apple, unit attention option ON/OFF; parity checking ON/OFF. different bytes per sector. nothing seems to help. all I'm getting now is
panic: (Cpu 0) scsi_cintr: bad sd_state
also tried to boot the NS 3.3 installer fom my external CF card reader. but it hangs while scanning the SCSI bus.
giving up for today...
Mikeboss: I see the same behavior in my '030 cube that you reported. It must be a SCSI controller issue.
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Brian
brian,
thank you for checking! since it's working with the CF AztecMonster, I guess that the SCSI2SD still has some issues... I'll wait for the next firmware update.
regards,
mike
Good news everyone! A new firmware was released and now I have an '030 cube booting from it. I still see those messages at startup, but everything seems to work. So we may finally have a cheap open source solution to our problem. The schematics are freely available, but I think his prices are very fair.
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Brian
I exchanged an email with the designer ( Michael ) and it seems these "sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED " messages are likely do to the adapter not supporting synchronous transfers. He has offered to prepare a debug version with some logging ability so we can verify that to be the case. Otherwise I kept it running all this evening and had no issues.
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Brian
Quote from: "barcher174"Good news everyone! A new firmware was released and now I have an '030 cube booting from it. I still see those messages at startup, but everything seems to work. So we may finally have a cheap open source solution to our problem. The schematics are freely available, but I think his prices are very fair.
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Brian
good news indeed! I'll try mine as soon as I have some spare time... thanks for the heads-up.
Ok I tried with NS 1.0 and got this same error:
panic: (Cpu 0) scsi_cintr: bad sd_state
3.3 seems to have no trouble. Hopefully the debug firmware will shed some light on the situation. I'll update when I receive it.
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Brian
Brian,
I want to order SCSI2SD adapter but I don't have a PC/Mac I can mess with in case it needs a firmware upgrade,etc.
Would you say this adapter (as-is) is ready for prime time?
My HDD is starting to make noise (more than the usual loud noises) and I'm looking to get a cheap-ish adapter so I can run NS 3.3..
Thanks!
Gaspar
I've acquired a couple of the SCSI2SD cards and have had no problems configuring them for the Apple Macintosh systems I have collected (e.g. Power Macintosh 7100, Iici), but I'm getting the same errors as others on my three NeXT systems (e.g. "sc: MESSAGE REJECT RECEIVED").
If anyone has actually made this card work as a functioning SCSI-1 or SCSI-2 drive on their NeXT, could you PLEASE post the steps you took (and leave no step un-listed, starting with scsi2sd-config(1) the card)? You will be a hero if you do.
Thanks in advance!
PS. I have the v3.0 card. Does anyone have experience with the newer hardware design on NeXT?
Good news. With the lastest firmware I have an 030 cube booting from the scsi2sd adapter.
http://www.codesrc.com/files/scsi2sd/v3.5.2/firmware/--
Brian
Quote from: "barcher174"Good news. With the lastest firmware I have an 030 cube booting from the scsi2sd adapter.
http://www.codesrc.com/files/scsi2sd/v3.5.2/firmware/
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Brian
How does it perform in NeXT against a native SCSI drive?
Quote from: "barcher174"Good news. With the lastest firmware I have an 030 cube booting from the scsi2sd adapter.
Thanks for testing this out with black hardware. I've had good experiences with the scsi2sd adapters on my other platforms (Apple IIgs, Macs) and have even provided feedback to the dev for the next release of the 2.5" adapter. Indeed, the earlier firmware versions also did not work with my other platforms, but started to work with firmware v3.
I've not tested the speed, but I probably wouldn't mind if it doesn't even provide a gain in speed. The convenience of being able to take the microSD in and out, mount it in other environments, backing it up, availability of microSDs compared to SCSI -- those alone are well worth the price of the scsi2sd adapter. And better than the combination of Acard SCSI-IDE plus IDE-CF/SD adapters.