For performance related projects going forward, avoiding SCSI if for no other reason than to get away from SCSIMgr and the driver problems, seems to be the way to go. Unfortunately, all of the logic for partitions, which are required for making larger media useful due to filesystem limitations for the earlier machines, is wrapped up with SCSIMgr. It would be possible to implement a partitioning scheme with whatever driver ends up being written to handle newer interfaces, it's just more to do.

Click to expand...

If someone *were* to someday graft an IDE (or flash) memory device directly onto an old Mac via an expansion port/CPU piggyback type arrangement my ignorant suggestion for how to support it would be via a replacement .Sony floppy driver. That was actually the approach taken by the HD-20, and it's also used in Mac emulators like BasiliskII and vMac. (In those cases the replacement .Sony is patched into the ROM image, thus allowing direct booting of large volumes as if they were "floppies".) You skip a lot of SCSI-related whohaw doing that, and the code seems to be fairly well understood.