Thread
HDD alternatives?
To be truthful, all that brainstorming about hanging IDE ports (or whatever) off PDS slots or ROM SIMMs aside my genuine opinion is for 90-whatever-percent of Ye Old Macintosh applications the "correct" solution is a bridge that hangs off the SCSI port. It's the one bus that all those machines have in common, it's a pretty least-common-denominator version of it (8 bit single ended, "Fast" mode optional), the drivers are finished, and while in principle it might be possible to eek *slightly* more performance out of one of those old boxes by cutting out the middleman and hanging something off a direct bus port... really, is it going to make a difference if your SE/30's disk performance is only 50-some-odd-times slower than a modern machine verses a hundred? It's still *amn slow, son.
There's one area, personally, where I think a direct bus port design would offer real value, and coincidentally it's also the area where the level of technological expertise required to achieve success is low enough that a relatively ham-fisted hobbyist-built design has a chance of working. That of course is something for the SCSI-less toaster Macs, IE, the 128k (although fitting a driver into 128k might be hopeless) through 512ke systems. If desoldering/piggybacking on the 68000 is too daunting there's still the ROM socket approach. (There's the documented John Bass SCSI design, and the Dove SCSI boards also worked that way.) This is something that fits into a small handful of TTL circuitry, doesn't require extensive modifications, and is a solution documented to work. (Minus the design change of replacing the SCSI chip with an IDE device, microcontroller, whatever, of course.) The only other options for those machines are Macintosh Plus upgrades (either literal or a combination of expansion boards that add up to one with the attendant need for a SCSI drive or suitable replacement *anyway*), or really unobtainable items like a working HD-20 or GCC Hyperdrive.
But, eh, you know it's *impossible* to do something like they did back in 1985 with a few TTL chips without resorting to an FPGA these days...
There's one area, personally, where I think a direct bus port design would offer real value, and coincidentally it's also the area where the level of technological expertise required to achieve success is low enough that a relatively ham-fisted hobbyist-built design has a chance of working. That of course is something for the SCSI-less toaster Macs, IE, the 128k (although fitting a driver into 128k might be hopeless) through 512ke systems. If desoldering/piggybacking on the 68000 is too daunting there's still the ROM socket approach. (There's the documented John Bass SCSI design, and the Dove SCSI boards also worked that way.) This is something that fits into a small handful of TTL circuitry, doesn't require extensive modifications, and is a solution documented to work. (Minus the design change of replacing the SCSI chip with an IDE device, microcontroller, whatever, of course.) The only other options for those machines are Macintosh Plus upgrades (either literal or a combination of expansion boards that add up to one with the attendant need for a SCSI drive or suitable replacement *anyway*), or really unobtainable items like a working HD-20 or GCC Hyperdrive.
But, eh, you know it's *impossible* to do something like they did back in 1985 with a few TTL chips without resorting to an FPGA these days...
I must be lucky then finding working SCSI 50 pin HDs for next to nothing. it might be because I am always on the lookout for cheap consumables for the hobby (and HD's and floppy drives are consumables because of moving parts). If you are going to look when you actually need a replacement drive then you are stuck with whatever is around at the time.
I lucked out years ago and purchased a whole box of 1 or 2GB 50 pin drives NOS (20 pcs) most with 0 hours and they work fine (price was $15 or 20 forget which). Even the used drives I find seems to be reliable, and I do test them for any bad sectors and dump the ones with any bad ones. I stocked up on old IDE drives for my old PCs from arecycler and paid something like $2 a drive that I kept (the bad ones went back at no charge). Stocking up on IDE laptop drives now as well (having a large laptop collection mans having tons of spares).
I have yet boot up a machine I redid and have the HD go bad. Some machines sit for a year before I get back to using them but none are stored where the temperature and humidity goes crazy up or down.
I lucked out years ago and purchased a whole box of 1 or 2GB 50 pin drives NOS (20 pcs) most with 0 hours and they work fine (price was $15 or 20 forget which). Even the used drives I find seems to be reliable, and I do test them for any bad sectors and dump the ones with any bad ones. I stocked up on old IDE drives for my old PCs from arecycler and paid something like $2 a drive that I kept (the bad ones went back at no charge). Stocking up on IDE laptop drives now as well (having a large laptop collection mans having tons of spares).
I have yet boot up a machine I redid and have the HD go bad. Some machines sit for a year before I get back to using them but none are stored where the temperature and humidity goes crazy up or down.