[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
On 12/3/2023 2:19 PM, John H. Reinhardt via cctalk wrote: On 12/3/2023 10:27 AM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: That is my question. I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? Doug State of the Art SCSI replacement is the ZuluSCSI RP2040 which is from the same people as SCSI2HD (I think - at least the same US Store). In any case the SCSI2HD is generally out of stock unless there is some NOS left. The ZuluSCSI is what is in production now. It's under continual development with fixes and new features are being added (for better or worse). I have two in a MicroVAX3100-95. One is the main file systems - I have a 256GB SD card where there are 4 drives allocated. There are two 50GB main drives and 2 9GB system drives. I have them mirrored under VMS Volume Shadowing. I aim to use about 50% of the capacity of the SD card to allow plenty of space for the card's firmware to do wear leveling. They are SAMSUNG PRO Endurance cards with an estimated endurance of 140k hours. The other ZuluSCSI RP2040 card is mounted for external access and is the backup device. This gets rotated regularly. All that said, in the MV3100 they are still slower by a touch than rotating disks. But after having several Ebay SCSI disks have controller issues (shorting and burnt out controllers) I am hoping these are more trouble free. I also have 2 older SCSI2HD in my AlphaServer DS10 systems for removable storage. When I get a chance I am swapping them out for the ZuluSCSI RP2040 models because they are slightly faster and much easier to manage. The ZuluSCSI is a hybrid of the SCSI2HD hardware and SCSI firmware and the BlueSCSI management firmware. With the SCSI2HD you needed a utility (mostly) to mange the settings of the SCSI2HD card. COpying the data to the card usually meant using a utility like dd or something that could write to specific places on the card. With the ZuluSCI you format the SD card in FAT or EX-FAT (if your disks are bigger than 4GB) and put them on the card with a specific name format. The documentation explains it all pretty clearly. www.zuluscsi.com - US Store and some documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/wiki/ZuluSCSI-Manual - Documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware - firmware https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WB3D5GQ - Samsung PRO Endurance https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/memory-card/micro-sd-pro-endurance/ - marketing info Thanks, now I know what to ask for for Christmas! The only conflict I ever ran into was a Viking QDO would work in a MicroVax II, but not in a PDP-11. The other problem I ran into was when I removed the SCSI bus termination resistor pack from a V5 SCSI2SD and forgot the orientation on how to re-install it.
[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
On 12/3/2023 10:27 AM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: That is my question. I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? Doug State of the Art SCSI replacement is the ZuluSCSI RP2040 which is from the same people as SCSI2HD (I think - at least the same US Store). In any case the SCSI2HD is generally out of stock unless there is some NOS left. The ZuluSCSI is what is in production now. It's under continual development with fixes and new features are being added (for better or worse). I have two in a MicroVAX3100-95. One is the main file systems - I have a 256GB SD card where there are 4 drives allocated. There are two 50GB main drives and 2 9GB system drives. I have them mirrored under VMS Volume Shadowing. I aim to use about 50% of the capacity of the SD card to allow plenty of space for the card's firmware to do wear leveling. They are SAMSUNG PRO Endurance cards with an estimated endurance of 140k hours. The other ZuluSCSI RP2040 card is mounted for external access and is the backup device. This gets rotated regularly. All that said, in the MV3100 they are still slower by a touch than rotating disks. But after having several Ebay SCSI disks have controller issues (shorting and burnt out controllers) I am hoping these are more trouble free. I also have 2 older SCSI2HD in my AlphaServer DS10 systems for removable storage. When I get a chance I am swapping them out for the ZuluSCSI RP2040 models because they are slightly faster and much easier to manage. The ZuluSCSI is a hybrid of the SCSI2HD hardware and SCSI firmware and the BlueSCSI management firmware. With the SCSI2HD you needed a utility (mostly) to mange the settings of the SCSI2HD card. COpying the data to the card usually meant using a utility like dd or something that could write to specific places on the card. With the ZuluSCI you format the SD card in FAT or EX-FAT (if your disks are bigger than 4GB) and put them on the card with a specific name format. The documentation explains it all pretty clearly. www.zuluscsi.com - US Store and some documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/wiki/ZuluSCSI-Manual - Documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware - firmware https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WB3D5GQ - Samsung PRO Endurance https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/memory-card/micro-sd-pro-endurance/ - marketing info -- John H. Reinhardt
[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
On 12/3/2023 10:27 AM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: That is my question. I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? Doug State of the Art SCSI replacement is the ZuluSCSI RP2040 which is from the same people as SCSI2HD (I think - at least the same US Store). In any case the SCSI2HD is generally out of stock unless there is some NOS left. The ZuluSCSI is what is in production now. It's under continual development with fixes and new features are being added (for better or worse). I have two in a MicroVAX3100-95. One is the main file systems - I have a 256GB SD card where there are 4 drives allocated. There are two 50GB main drives and 2 9GB system drives. I have them mirrored under VMS Volume Shadowing. I aim to use about 50% of the capacity of the SD card to allow plenty of space for the card's firmware to do wear leveling. They are SAMSUNG PRO Endurance cards with an estimated endurance of 140k hours. The other ZuluSCSI RP2040 card is mounted for external access and is the backup device. This gets rotated regularly. All that said, in the MV3100 they are still slower by a touch than rotating disks. But after having several Ebay SCSI disks have controller issues (shorting and burnt out controllers) I am hoping these are more trouble free. I also have 2 older SCSI2HD in my AlphaServer DS10 systems for removable storage. When I get a chance I am swapping them out for the ZuluSCSI RP2040 models because they are slightly faster and much easier to manage. The ZuluSCSI is a hybrid of the SCSI2HD hardware and SCSI firmware and the BlueSCSI management firmware. With the SCSI2HD you needed a utility (mostly) to mange the settings of the SCSI2HD card. COpying the data to the card usually meant using a utility like dd or something that could write to specific places on the card. With the ZuluSCI you format the SD card in FAT or EX-FAT (if your disks are bigger than 4GB) and put them on the card with a specific name format. The documentation explains it all pretty clearly. www.zuluscsi.com - US Store and some documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/wiki/ZuluSCSI-Manual - Documentation https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware - firmware https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09WB3D5GQ - Samsung PRO Endurance https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/memory-card/micro-sd-pro-endurance/ - marketing info -- John H. Reinhardt
[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
I'm currently using a version 5 something (5.4 I think) of the SCSI2SD in my 11/83 to run 2.11BSD, it has worked well.
[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
> On Dec 3, 2023, at 8:27 AM, Douglas Taylor via cctalk > wrote: > > That is my question. > > I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with > Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct > connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. > > There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the > current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? > > Doug In 2021, one of the projects during my Sabbatical was to work over my VAXstation 4000’s. As part of this, I bought some SCSI2SD boards, and got one working in my VAXstation 4000/90. I planned to do the same with the VAXstation 4000/60 I have in a rack, but it’s still running off of a rack mount BA350, and a couple old SCSI drives. I should probably look into what it would take to put a SCSI2SD board in a SBB. I need to find time to work on my PDP-11/23+ and PDP-11/73, as I’m sure I need to replace the caps in the Powersupplies, so I haven’t tried to drive a SCSI2SD board with a Viking QDT. Zane
[cctalk] Re: Current SOA scsi disk emulators for DEC
On 03/12/2023 16:27, Douglas Taylor via cctalk wrote: That is my question. I have used a couple of versions of the SCSI2SD boards in the past with Viking, Emulex QC07, DEC RQXZ1 controllers in the past, and also direct connections to MicroVax SCSI buss's. There are other manufacturers of these SD to SCSI emulators now. What is the current SOA? What works, what doesn't work with DEC hardware? Doug I've never used any of these boards but if you leaf through "digital diggings" back catalogue on Youtube (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKBDY9lluRo) you can find that he's been working on getting BlueSCSI working with a VAXstation 3100. I thought he'd also done the same for DEC Alpha systems but I can't find that video, so I may have imagined it! But the BlueSCSI compatibility page does list a few Alpha systems: https://bluescsi.com/docs/Compatibility. There are reports of ZuluSCSI working with some Alpha systems too. Antonio -- Antonio Carlini anto...@acarlini.com
