We need something better than cards for retro PC HD Drive Replacement

[hunterjwizzard]

What about SCSI?

What about it? There's a lot of good SCSI options.

 

[doshea]

I know multi-gig file systems existed back in the 8 and 16 bit ISA eras but these were deep magic restricted to specialized storage systems. My dad often tells the story of a 4.5 gig system he worked on back in the early 90s that used removable platters the size of an LP record. This system stored the database and was attached directly to a purpose-built server. You might be able to access it from a personal computer but only through the network.

To me that sounds like a pretty old system rather than what was possible at the time.

From PC Magazine March 17, 1992:

Northgate Computer Systems Inc's $7,449 Elegance 433e file server offers eight front-accessible drive bays, a hard disk controller optimized for use with the NetWare network operating system, large amounts of RAM and many expansion slots. It comes with 32Mbytes of RAM, a 128Kbyte RAM cache, a 676Mbyte full-height hard disk, two floppy drives and a NetWare-aware SCSI disk controller made by Ciprico.

It was EISA which I guess falls into the ISA era. It's a bit specialised, but I think you could have built a NetWare server with an ISA bus and a few large SCSI disks in a regular machine, it just wouldn't have performed as well.

From looking in a 1991 PC Magazine, you could get a Seagate Wren 1050MB 5.25" full height SCSI drive for US$1779 or a 1.3GB full height ESDI Micropolis drive for US$2595.

If you didn't mind having a few drive letters, you could have that in your own PC with FAT filesystems, I suppose, but I'm sure that in the day that would have been exceedingly rare for anyone to need/get, so yes, you probably would have accessed that over the network too.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

To me that sounds like a pretty old system rather than what was possible at the time.

Yeah my dad can't remember the year, just that it seemed like a lot back then.

or a 1.3GB full height ESDI Micropolis drive for US$2595.

Funny story, I grew up about 45 minutes from Micropolis' headquarters and have not one but three former employees around to talk to. One of my current coworkers was even a test engineer back in the early 90s and worked on those ESDI drives.

I chatted with him about this thread and he agreed - large file systems did exist back then, but not on consumer PCs. Some truly impressive things existed in the server/HPC market at the time, but those aren't terribly useful.

 

[Al Kossow]

do any of them still have engineering docs?

 

[hunterjwizzard]

do any of them still have engineering docs?

I'll have to ask but its somewhat doubtful. My dad worked on the supply chain side. One of the guys was in technical support, the other worked as a test engineer and recently lost most of his stuff when a pipe broke. But I'll ask!

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Sadly no one's kept anything from that era and memories are fuzzy. A lot of the actual engineers are dead or senile by now, the guys who I know didn't hang on to any of the internal documentation after they left. A few of the old work tables from Micropolis are still in service at my present job, but that's not exactly helpful.

 

[aperezbios]

That said I do want a solution as above but for ALL versions of IDE. I know that is a big ask and probably a big challenge but I do think we will have it one day.

@Zippy Zapp Rabbit Hole Computing, my company, has been working on such a thing quietly for the last year and a half. While it isn't 100% ready for prime time, it is available for those who wish to help improve the product. ZuluIDE is powered by an RP2040 microcontroller, in concert with a small Lattice iCE5 FPGA. ZuluIDE can currently emulate both ATAPI CD-ROMs (of arbitrary size, vastly larger than an original CD-ROM would allow for) as well as ATAPI removable Read-Write devices, such as Zip drive emulation, or generic ATAPI removable media, again, of arbitrary volume size. The maximum volume size is limited only by the machine you use it with.

https://github.com/rabbitholecomputing/ZuluIDE-firmware and you can purchase one today at https://store.rabbitholecomputing.com/ZuluIDE.

The ZuluIDE firmware that runs on the RP2040 is open source, and anyone can build it from source, if they so desire. The FPGA which interfaces to the Parallel ATA bus and the RP2040 is closed source, and will likely remain this way indefinitely, in an effort to prevent clones. Rabbit Hole Computing has made a significant financial investment in this product, and we must now begin the process of recovering our initial cash investment. In the coming year, we expect to produce ZuluIDE in larger quantities, which will help us bring the manufacturing costs down, which I believe will in turn lead to a lower price point for ZuluIDE.

Currently, ZuluIDE supports PIO modes 0-3, as well as Ultra DMA 0. Real-world read speeds are around 7MB/second, which we expect to be able to improve significantly, via future firmware updates.

ZuluIDE has also been tested to work with FireWire to Parallel ATA, as well as inexpensive Serial ATA to Parallel ATA bridge products.

Instead of hijacking this thread entirely, I've created a thread for ZuluIDE disucssion here. PLEASE use it instead of responding to this thread