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Anyone able to swap Full Height SCSI out with SCSI2SD?

Not sure what you are asking? Swap how? Pull a full height out and stick in a SCSI2SD, or are you suggesting trading?
 
tradde said:
Not sure what you are asking? Swap how? Pull a full height out and stick in a SCSI2SD, or are you suggesting trading?
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Yes. If I wanted to do this. I'm concerned with the possible failure of an older drive and wanted to see if anyone had done this successfully yet.
 
I have used a SCSI2SD in place of a 1/2 height SCSI drive with no issues. I don't have any full height SCSI drives so I can't say. I don't see why there would be a problem though.
 
I replaced all the SCSI drives in my MV3100 M95 with two SCSI2HD cards and then replaced those with two ZuluSCSI rp2040 cards. The drives replaced weren't full height, but the standard 1/3 height drives found in most MV3100's.
 
Thanks to the both of you for telling me it's possible. I'm just mulling some ideas around right now. Other potential ideas to put in an ultra scsi 68pin with a converter board to 50pin scsi - i have 3 of these in a microvax 3100-40.
 
rjm957 said:
Thanks to the both of you for telling me it's possible. I'm just mulling some ideas around right now. Other potential ideas to put in an ultra scsi 68pin with a converter board to 50pin scsi - i have 3 of these in a microvax 3100-40.
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Yeah, it helps some to know your target. I've put SCSI2HD and now ZuluSCSI in both my MicroVAX 3100 and in an Alphaserver DS10. Before the SCSI replacement cards the MV3100 had 1/3 height SCSI drives with the 80-pin SCA connecter and an 80=>50 pin adapter board. That works too. The 80-pin SCA drives are all 10-20 years or more old now so there was a steady swapping out as the drives developed errors. With the SCSI replacement cards swapping out failed media is just a matter of swapping SD cards (which hasn't happened yet). My theory is to buy the cards intended for endurance applications like security and dashboard cams, buy them several times too big and allow the wear leveling firmware a large area to distribute writes.
 
SCSI uses a standard command set that's been around forever. Of course, if you have really old equipment, it could use only 6 byte CDBs, so accessible storage might be limited to the first GB or so.
LVD vs. HVD could be an issue. I don't know if SCSI2SD handles anything except SE.

Just trying to think of anything else...
 
I suspect that you lost a lot of sustained transfer rate in the Alphaserver DS10 swap.

I'm interested to see when we get a good direct replacement for wide/ultrawide and faster SCSI disks from any of the open hardware SCSI replacements. I'm guessing that it will depend a lot on high speed access to the SD card, as I believe that is one of the main limiting factors.

- Alex
 
ajacocks said:
I suspect that you lost a lot of sustained transfer rate in the Alphaserver DS10 swap.
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Oh, for sure. It's not the main drive in that system. I still have the boot drive as an Ultra3 SCSI SCA-80 => 68-pin drive. I've also played around and managed to get an HP P410 SATA card to work and I have 3TB of SSD in one DS10 and the other has 1TB SSD in a hardware RAID-10 on the P410 backed by flash cache. I can't boot from it, unfortunately but it works great as data disks.
ajacocks said:
I'm interested to see when we get a good direct replacement for wide/ultrawide and faster SCSI disks from any of the open hardware SCSI replacements. I'm guessing that it will depend a lot on high speed access to the SD card, as I believe that is one of the main limiting factors.

- Alex
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I poked around looking for info on UltraSCSI interface chips but didn't find much. I think it would be an interesting, but tough project to interface something like that to an SSD SATA or NVme disk card. I wish the ACARD SCSI to SATA adapters were sill being produced. They are now around $1K on ebay and so out of any normal person's price range.
 
i've had good luck replacing drives on everything i've used one on, i've only used a scsi2sd and the newer ones are even better :) i think bluescsi is the recommended one these days. right now they should be able to replace pretty much anything (except for weird 520/522 byte AS400 drives, but that might change someday soon)
 
hush said:
i've had good luck replacing drives on everything i've used one on, i've only used a scsi2sd and the newer ones are even better :) i think bluescsi is the recommended one these days. right now they should be able to replace pretty much anything (except for weird 520/522 byte AS400 drives, but that might change someday soon)
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IDK I moved on from SCSI2SD to using the ZuluSCSI, RP2040 version. Very much like it both functionally and performance-wise. Have never used the bluescsi board.
Read here: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/scsi-sd-card-adapter-for-emulex-qbus-card.1245327/
 
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