FilterHN

Ask HN: Anyone have a good solution for modern Mac to legacy SCSI converters?

14 points

by stmw

1 hour ago

| past

| 9 comments

| HN

Meaning attaching old SCSI drives to modern Macs, not putting SSDs into old Macs.

▲

netrap

3 minutes ago

[-]

There are some Firewire SCSI adapters. Sometimes older Firewire tape drives have internal SCSI to Firewire boards. I've used them to with old SCSI CD drives.

▲

eschaton

1 hour ago

[-]

GBSCSI and ZuluSCSI support “initiator mode” that can be used to either image an attached SCSI disk to a file on an SD card or provide live access to it over USB as a mass storage device—with better performance than the old USB 1.1 SCSI adapters too, which top out at about 750KB/sec.

▲

vanchor3

33 minutes ago

[-]

They are still USB 1.1 however, so they won't be able to surpass that speed limitation over USB.

▲

stmw

33 minutes ago

[-]

Thanks, looking into this more now.

▲

seritools

1 hour ago

[-]

If the reason to connect them is to dump them, something like https://bluescsi.com/ in Initiator Mode might work: https://bluescsi.com/docs/Initiator-Mode

▲

stmw

33 minutes ago

[-]

Than you, will look... I had been vaguely aware of it before but will look more seriously.

▲

RAMJAC

28 minutes ago

[-]

https://github.com/PiSCSI/piscsi

Get yourself a board, raspberry pi, and set up a samba server.

▲

stmw

9 minutes ago

[-]

This appears to be the opposite - "PiSCSI allows a Raspberry Pi to function as emulated SCSI devices (hard disk, CD-ROM, and others)"

▲

sigio

1 hour ago

[-]

Amazon has usb scsi adapters, I dont use apple devices, but i'd guess that would work. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=usb+scsi+adapter&ia=web

▲

ch_123

1 hour ago

[-]

Looking at "scsi to usb" on amazon.com, most of the options I see are SATA, IDE or even parallel printer port adapters, but nothing which allows a SCSI device to be connected to a USB port.

▲

stmw

1 hour ago

[-]

Hmm, what I see on Amazon is a lot of USB-to-SATA adapters, not SCSI. eBay has used, old USB-to-SCSI adapters, which is one of the options that's sometimes recommended.

▲

codesnik

1 hour ago

[-]

very much not on topic, but that reminded me: my first PC (286) miraculously had a 40MB 2.5" Apple-branded HDD connected via SCSI adapter. Who knows where it was sourced from. One weird thing was that it initialized on boot for about 40 seconds, displaying nothing. I've been really surprised later seeing how fast other PCs with ATA drives were to boot. I still wonder, and maybe someone has a clue why init was so long? Is it something inherent to SCSI?

▲

kstrauser

1 hour ago

[-]

For contrast, I had an Amiga with a 120MB Maxtor SCSI drive, and power-on to looking at the loaded Workbench GUI was about 6-7 seconds. The slowest part was waiting for the drive to spin up, which seems like an acceptable reason for a delay. Warm reboots were a few seconds faster.

So no, that's not anything inherent to SCSI. It could've been either the SCSI driver being slow to initialize, or the adapter being glacial, or the drive itself taking forever to come online.

▲

reincarnate0x14

1 hour ago

[-]

Nothing to do with SCSI itself, possibly a long time out polling for devices. Some dumb firmware would do silly things like poll each possible target ID and wait for a timeout in series. 6 possible devices on an old early SPI bus times a 5 seconds each is getting you in the neighborhood.

Having flashbacks to troubleshooting bus termination on DEC equipment.

▲

shrubble

1 hour ago

[-]

It depends on the scsi driver; it’s possible that it was checking/enumerating the 6 possible SCSI ids and waiting 5 seconds each.

▲

lallysingh

24 minutes ago

[-]

How well did you terminate the scsi chain?

▲

EvanAnderson

21 minutes ago

[-]

A lot of SCSI devices can be jumpered to self-terminate.

▲

stmw

1 hour ago

[-]

Neat! Well, SCSI is more complicated (than IDE of the times) and the drives themselves are smarter, but that still seems like a long time.

▲

codesnik

1 hour ago

[-]

I've been 10-11 at the time, and half the games I had didn't have an obvious "quit" menu option. I hated pressing the hardware "reset" button because it meant waiting for a minute again, staring at the BIOS setup screen.

Every time I figured out a weird hidden keyboard combination to exit from yet another game was a happy day.

▲

itomato

1 hour ago

[-]

If you need to connect them physically, I think you're blocked by HBA chipset support in macOS.

There is a path, but it's not what I'd call "good". Thunderbolt to Firewire to SCSI. It's a dongle Rapunzel and you're reliant on device enclosures for power.

May be better with a native PCI-e or PCI HBA and 700W power supply and a junker ATX Linux machine to provide network shares.

▲

ch_123

1 hour ago

[-]

> May be better with a native PCI-e or PCI HBA and 700W power supply and a junker ATX Linux machine to provide network shares.

Agreed. Even if it's possible to get a combination of adapters to allow a SCSI interface to be attached to a Mac (and assuming the correct driver support is present), I think getting an old PC and an old SCSI adapter card may be cheaper.

▲

stmw

1 hour ago

[-]

I considered the Linux box solution, and fear you're probably right, but it just feels like such a waste... for something that should be so simple with all this Mac Book horse power and Thunderbolt interfaces.

▲

cosmotic

1 hour ago

[-]

Here's a solution to the opposite problem: https://bluescsi.com/

▲

seritools

1 hour ago

[-]

not even opposite, as mentioned in my comment it does have Initiator Mode, allowing it to act as a host

▲

jeffbee

1 hour ago

[-]

Use any other kind of PC with an expansion bus to dump the blocks to a modern block device, then attach that to the Mac.

▲

stmw

2 minutes ago

[-]

That is unfortunately the likely fallback... It just feels so wasteful and inelegant.

▲

itchingsphynx

8 minutes ago

[-]

I used to be an Apple service technician. We kept an old mac that had SCSI in an expansion port and Ethernet in another for precisely this reason.

I once transferred all 20MB of a Mac Plus hard drive, an author’s lifetime work, to a new iMac with this method.