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Solid State SCSI HD in Mac IIfx

W

wheagy

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 10, 2010
Messages
101
Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone has advice for putting a solid state SCSI HD in a Mac IIfx and copying the current drive to the new drive? I have an IIfx with a Barracuda 4gb SCSI drive (ST15150N). The machine is unique in that it has a MacIvory 2 card stack and a Genera 8.3 install on the drive. I worry about this drive failing and losing the Genera software install. Replacing it with a solid state solution would help alleviate these concerns. Any advice on doing this? Would something like this work?
https://www.ebay.com/itm/new-SCSI2S...398642?hash=item2f2877bcb2:g:37QAAOSwAVlcGkQd

Thanks,

Win
 
I don't think it matters what you use for a system drive as those can be easily replaced. You should backup the files to someplace safe.
 
Does Genera use its own file system?

Either way, what I would do is use a PC with a SCSI card that can connect to the drive, then use Linux "dd" or similar to store the hard drive image as a file. Then you can write that file back to any other SCSI device, including a SCSI2SD that is of equal or larger size.

With just Mac software, you could even then mount the image in an emulator to run it. Although in this case, I see a MacIvory is a specialty hardware co-processor.
 
Yes, thanks. I made a dd image years ago, but of course am not 100% sure if it's good. I'd love to have two HDs for the machine...one inside and one spare. While I have a good working drive, I'd like to replace the SCSI HD for a number of reasons:
1) it can then be a back up and minimize wear and tear on the Barracuda for when I want sell the MacIvory (as we all know, that mechanical drive is likely to be the first thing in the machine to die)
2) a replacement Barracuda is expensive ($400-$500), and
3) I'm thinking a solid state SCSI might be a good option for my day to day use of the MacIvory, demos, etc.

So just interested if anyone has specific recommendations for a solid state drive? The Mac OS and Genera 8.3 OS are both on the same Barracuda HD. By the way, if you haven't played with Genera, it is very cool/interesting.

Win
 
A SCSI2SD board isn't going to be any more reliable than a mechanical hard drive. The only reason it really exists is because of the dwindling number of ancient SCSI hard drives available and their subsequent high cost has made it more cost effective to emulate them. Flash memory failing is a common problem, I've seen large numbers of flash media devices like SD cards, CF cards and flash drives randomly pack up for no apparent reason. It gets even worse if you have a OS that has no concept of wear levelling where the device doesn't have one either. So you end up with multiple flash memory cells pounded by reads and writes that prematurely wear out and kill the whole flash device.

Another problem is the HFS file system and Mac OS itself. HFS isn't at all fault tolerant and becomes more prone to problems the larger the volume size is. Mac OS itself is hugely problematic because it's a cooperatively multitasking OS, where it depends on all applications running on the system to behave properly at all times for stability. This was basically a pipedream, and "system bomb" crashes were frequent that often caused various amounts of data corruption in the process. Sometimes it was minor, but sometimes it could wipe the whole partition or even the drive itself.

This is why there were a multitude of 3rd party system extensions like bomb shelter, program suites like Norton System Works and even Motorola's own debugger MacsBug were used to try and recover from system crashes. I remember one story long ago on AOL news groups where a student was writing a term paper on some 68k Macintosh and the system crashed before a save. They lost hours of work, but thanks to MacsBug and them knowing how to use it, they were able to dump the contents of system memory to a file and managed to save most everything.
 
I agree, which is why I'd like to get a second boot drive that works. Solid state solutions are, in my experience, easier to backup since you can quickly pull the card and dd it to make a backup. If it dies, a restore is relatively easy compared to a spinning SCSI drive (which is also very expensive to replace now).

So just looking for recommendations if anyone has done this on their Mac? What solid state drive did you use and were there any issues?

Thanks,

Win
 
Unless you have some proprietary partitions, you can quite literally just copy files in Mac OS to the new partition on the SCSI2SD and it'll in most cases work fine. No need to use DD.

The SCSI2SD is probably your best bet as far as cost is concerned. There are SCSI to IDE adapter boards that plug into the back of an IDE drive and give a SCSI interface, as well as SCSI SSDs, but they're hideously expensive and rare.

Back when I was a projectionist, we had to use SCSI to IDE adapters in some of the DTS head units as their drives died (the film audio in DTS systems is stored on CD-ROM) because the DTS unit used 50 pin SCSI and replacement drives were getting expensive and unreliable.
 
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