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

13•stmw•1h ago

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

Comments

sigio•1h 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

stmw•1h 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.

ch_123•1h 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.

codesnik•1h 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?

stmw•1h 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•1h 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.

shrubble•1h 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.

kstrauser•1h 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•54m 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.

lallysingh•13m ago

How well did you terminate the scsi chain?

EvanAnderson•9m ago

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

itomato•1h 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•1h 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•1h 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•1h ago

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

seritools•1h ago

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

seritools•1h 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•21m ago

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

eschaton•1h 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.

stmw•22m ago

Thanks, looking into this more now.

vanchor3•21m ago

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

jeffbee•54m 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.

RAMJAC•17m ago

https://github.com/PiSCSI/piscsi

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

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

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