4 ms·

BlueSCSI – Open, Low Cost, DIY SCSI to SD Device – TinkerDifferent

riedel 5y ago
Seems similar to https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI. Would be great if there was also the other way around. It seems that usb to SCSI adapters aren't manufactured anymore due to the lack of controller chips although it is all similar at protocol level.
- snvzz 5y ago
  BlueSCSI seems to be a rebrand of https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32 https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32. edit: Some improvements were added.
  - helfire 5y ago
    We list that right on the github/top of the page linked. Speed/stability improvements, adding CD support, Macintosh specifics, easier config/use, documentation, community, etc. Checkout the repo for more info.
snvzz 5y ago
Wrong headline. From the repository: >Hardware is licensed sperately under CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. Refer to `hw/README.md`. Therefore, despite claims of "open hardware", it is actually not so (not OSHW). A shame. This seems to be fully intentional, as the site goes on to provide a list of "authorized" sellers. If you're not one of these "authorized" sellers, then you cannot legally make and sell this hardware.
- helfire 5y ago
  Creator here. I wanted to give people the ability to have the ability to print them out for personal use or buy from a seller. Early in the project someone attempted to commercially take it over so I chose this licenses. Is it perfect? no. You can of course design your own, but mine are provided under that license. See some projects like Elastic, Sentry, etc have run into similar licensing issues when trying to provide something to the community for free.
  - phoronixrly 5y ago
    Hello, Thank you for distributing the designs. The choice of license is completely yours to make. That is what the comment above should have said instead of complaining.
  - snvzz 5y ago
    I take no issue with you choosing whatever license you want. It's your own work, after all. My dissatisfaction is only with the Open Hardware claim, present and prominent in what I assume is your website[0]. It has a definition[1], and your choice of license does not meet it. I do not wish for the meaning of Open Hardware to be diluted, thus the comment. [0]: https://scsi.blue/ https://scsi.blue/ [1]: https://www.oshwa.org/definition/ https://www.oshwa.org/definition/
    - polpo 5y ago
      “Open hardware” is a pretty generic term and OSHWA doesn’t have a monopoly over how people use it.
      - opan 5y ago
        This same weak argument gets used against "open source", and while I strongly prefer "free software", I still think it's ridiculous how much people make this claim. Get your own terms. Stop trying to make the world a worse place for those who care about freedom, please.
        bogantech 5y ago
        Who is it making the world worse for besides the leeches who take it and sell it?
        snvzz 5y ago
        Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms, testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This is true regardless of Open Hardware. I therefore do not see anything wrong with selling Open Hardware. As everybody can do this, the hardware itself is commoditized, and society at large does benefit.
krallja 5y ago
I have a BlueSCSI for booting my Macintosh SE. It boots in seconds, which was definitely not the case when I had 20MB of spinning rust. Also, Finder in System 6.0.8 supports 2GB volumes just fine — but shows it as “59,592K in disk 2,009,792K available.” Didn’t even implement the M suffix!
dark-star 5y ago
BlueSCSI, RaSCSI, SCSI2SD... there's plenty of these projects recently. All have pro's and con's so consider them thoroughly
- sponaugle 5y ago
  I have a couple of SCSI2SD v6s in my Indy and Alphastation, and they work well. I'll have to give one of these BlueSCSIs a try. The SCSI2SD got much faster in v6, as the earlier ones were pretty slow. The combination of these kinds of SCSI emulators and cards like the XT-IDE really make vintage computers available to more people.
rsync 5y ago
Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and useful ? Which is to say, one would attach a 2.5" SSD as the SATA device rather than a SD device ... I have such an adaptor: http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page613.htm http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page613.htm ... although I am not sure if they are produced anymore. I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing the relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the end is 50pin SCSI ...
- Maursault 5y ago
  > Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and useful ? No. BlueSCSI and other SCSI device emulators are intended for use with SCSI-1 (narrow) and SCSI-2 (fast) controllers, maybe even Wide SCSI-2 (fast wide) for some, so the maximum bandwidth here is 5, 10 and 20 MB/s, respectively. Secure Digital is a pretty good match for bandwidth and in many if not most cases saturates the bus. Even if you had a SCSI to NMVe SSD adapter, it would never perform faster than the old bus it's running off. > I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing the relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the end is 50pin SCSI ... Sometimes the bottleneck is the CPU. In some popular vintage classic machines, on a very good day, the bandwidth of the RAM is almost 15MB/s.
  - rvense 5y ago
    AFAIK no old Mac will do 5MB/s on its built-in, external SCSI.
    - Maursault 5y ago
      That's the maximum bandwidth for narrow SCSI-1, used in anything from Mac Plus to 68030 machines. The external SCSI, a separate bus, is always SCSI-1. Sometimes the internal SCSI is SCSI-2 (some 68040 & PPC Macs). WGS95 had a wide SCSI card (so had 3 separate SCSI busses, narrow, fast, and fast wide). Reportedly, with any of the SCSI emulators, it is not difficult to saturate a narrow SCSI bus with a 68030 Mac, so... it will do exactly 5MB/s on narrow SCSI in these cases.
  - 5y ago
tus666 5y ago
Used one in a Mac Quadra recently. Works well. Much cheaper than the alternatives too.
mleonhard 5y ago
> Currently the final versions in the hands authorized sellers "Authorized sellers" is redundant. In a free market, everyone is authorized to sell every legal good at all times. I think the author meant "licensed manufacturers".
stevenicr 5y ago
Not sure I understand what/how this does. Did see "the USB port is not usable for file transfer. Maybe in the future." Maybe it's because I am mac-unfamiliar mostly? I have an old Hard-Drive with an ultra-wide scsi cable that I want to get data off of one day - but have not seen an ulra-wide-scsi to USB cable anywhere.. Pretty sure I have some old scss pci cards around and pentium 1(?) / sdram / agp boards / boxes, but little motivation to delve into that pile of stuff that may or may not work. If this thing could adapt the U-W-scsi drive arrays I have, I'd buy it immediately, but I'm thinking it doesn't, although maybe in the future?

Seems similar to https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI. Would be great if there was also the other way around. It seems that usb to SCSI adapters aren't manufactured anymore due to the lack of controller chips although it is all similar at protocol level.

snvzz 5y ago
BlueSCSI seems to be a rebrand of https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32 https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32. edit: Some improvements were added.
- helfire 5y ago
  We list that right on the github/top of the page linked. Speed/stability improvements, adding CD support, Macintosh specifics, easier config/use, documentation, community, etc. Checkout the repo for more info.

snvzz 5y ago

Wrong headline. From the repository: >Hardware is licensed sperately under CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. Refer to `hw/README.md`. Therefore, despite claims of "open hardware", it is actually not so (not OSHW). A shame. This seems to be fully intentional, as the site goes on to provide a list of "authorized" sellers. If you're not one of these "authorized" sellers, then you cannot legally make and sell this hardware.

helfire 5y ago
Creator here. I wanted to give people the ability to have the ability to print them out for personal use or buy from a seller. Early in the project someone attempted to commercially take it over so I chose this licenses. Is it perfect? no. You can of course design your own, but mine are provided under that license. See some projects like Elastic, Sentry, etc have run into similar licensing issues when trying to provide something to the community for free.
- phoronixrly 5y ago
  Hello, Thank you for distributing the designs. The choice of license is completely yours to make. That is what the comment above should have said instead of complaining.
- snvzz 5y ago
  I take no issue with you choosing whatever license you want. It's your own work, after all. My dissatisfaction is only with the Open Hardware claim, present and prominent in what I assume is your website[0]. It has a definition[1], and your choice of license does not meet it. I do not wish for the meaning of Open Hardware to be diluted, thus the comment. [0]: https://scsi.blue/ https://scsi.blue/ [1]: https://www.oshwa.org/definition/ https://www.oshwa.org/definition/
  - polpo 5y ago
    “Open hardware” is a pretty generic term and OSHWA doesn’t have a monopoly over how people use it.
    - opan 5y ago
      This same weak argument gets used against "open source", and while I strongly prefer "free software", I still think it's ridiculous how much people make this claim. Get your own terms. Stop trying to make the world a worse place for those who care about freedom, please.
      - bogantech 5y ago
        Who is it making the world worse for besides the leeches who take it and sell it?
        snvzz 5y ago
        Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms, testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This is true regardless of Open Hardware. I therefore do not see anything wrong with selling Open Hardware. As everybody can do this, the hardware itself is commoditized, and society at large does benefit.

krallja 5y ago

I have a BlueSCSI for booting my Macintosh SE. It boots in seconds, which was definitely not the case when I had 20MB of spinning rust. Also, Finder in System 6.0.8 supports 2GB volumes just fine — but shows it as “59,592K in disk 2,009,792K available.” Didn’t even implement the M suffix!

dark-star 5y ago

BlueSCSI, RaSCSI, SCSI2SD... there's plenty of these projects recently. All have pro's and con's so consider them thoroughly

sponaugle 5y ago
I have a couple of SCSI2SD v6s in my Indy and Alphastation, and they work well. I'll have to give one of these BlueSCSIs a try. The SCSI2SD got much faster in v6, as the earlier ones were pretty slow. The combination of these kinds of SCSI emulators and cards like the XT-IDE really make vintage computers available to more people.

rsync 5y ago

Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and useful ? Which is to say, one would attach a 2.5" SSD as the SATA device rather than a SD device ... I have such an adaptor: http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page613.htm http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page613.htm ... although I am not sure if they are produced anymore. I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing the relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the end is 50pin SCSI ...

Maursault 5y ago
> Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and useful ? No. BlueSCSI and other SCSI device emulators are intended for use with SCSI-1 (narrow) and SCSI-2 (fast) controllers, maybe even Wide SCSI-2 (fast wide) for some, so the maximum bandwidth here is 5, 10 and 20 MB/s, respectively. Secure Digital is a pretty good match for bandwidth and in many if not most cases saturates the bus. Even if you had a SCSI to NMVe SSD adapter, it would never perform faster than the old bus it's running off. > I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing the relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the end is 50pin SCSI ... Sometimes the bottleneck is the CPU. In some popular vintage classic machines, on a very good day, the bandwidth of the RAM is almost 15MB/s.
- rvense 5y ago
  AFAIK no old Mac will do 5MB/s on its built-in, external SCSI.
  - Maursault 5y ago
    That's the maximum bandwidth for narrow SCSI-1, used in anything from Mac Plus to 68030 machines. The external SCSI, a separate bus, is always SCSI-1. Sometimes the internal SCSI is SCSI-2 (some 68040 & PPC Macs). WGS95 had a wide SCSI card (so had 3 separate SCSI busses, narrow, fast, and fast wide). Reportedly, with any of the SCSI emulators, it is not difficult to saturate a narrow SCSI bus with a 68030 Mac, so... it will do exactly 5MB/s on narrow SCSI in these cases.
- 5y ago

tus666 5y ago

Used one in a Mac Quadra recently. Works well. Much cheaper than the alternatives too.

mleonhard 5y ago

> Currently the final versions in the hands authorized sellers "Authorized sellers" is redundant. In a free market, everyone is authorized to sell every legal good at all times. I think the author meant "licensed manufacturers".

stevenicr 5y ago

Not sure I understand what/how this does. Did see "the USB port is not usable for file transfer. Maybe in the future." Maybe it's because I am mac-unfamiliar mostly? I have an old Hard-Drive with an ultra-wide scsi cable that I want to get data off of one day - but have not seen an ulra-wide-scsi to USB cable anywhere.. Pretty sure I have some old scss pci cards around and pentium 1(?) / sdram / agp boards / boxes, but little motivation to delve into that pile of stuff that may or may not work. If this thing could adapt the U-W-scsi drive arrays I have, I'd buy it immediately, but I'm thinking it doesn't, although maybe in the future?