[rescue] [FWIW] RaSCSI

[Peter Stokes]

o;?
Hi

Just a follow up on this purchase. Thought it may be useful to someone out
there.

I received the kits promptly with tracked shipping. To recap I wanted a 40 pin
PowerBook type of drive for the Voyager, rather than the 50 pin version. They
are essentially variations on the same core, just connector differences on the
board.

After building one and buying a 16Gb microSD card, creating a 8Gb file on the
card, I installed into the Voyager. A few false starts with a problem on one
of the Voyager boards I have, but when I had eliminated that, the Voyager
booted via net boot up to single user in Solaris 6 and I tried to format the
drive. Format saw the drive, but on selection said the rpm value in Mode sense
was 0 and setting to 3600, but immediately crashed with an assertion failure.
All very frustrating. I did not try with 7 as I do not have that setup on my
net install server.

So I installed the BlueSCSI drive in a SS20 via a 40->50 pin SCSI adapter and
used the CD connector. Booted Solaris 8 and format works fine. It still says
about the rpm issue, but then continues as normal to allow labelling etc. News
also works no problem.

I then returned the unit to the Voyager, booted with Sol 6 and installed it on
the BlueSCSI drive as per normal.

One anomaly is that a probe-scsi will return 8 luns rather than just the
single one. Apparently the BlueSCSI firmware does not implement luns at this
time which is a shame as it would be the obvious way of having multiple drives
on it rather than wasting multiple IDs which are often limited. Format however
only sees the single lun 0 so no issue on running Solaris.

As to data rate the version I have appears reasonably fast. Apparently having
it formatted as ExFAT improves the throughput, though I have not done any
testing, just subjective of the system during booting etc.

Peter

Hi

I decided to order 2 off of the 40 pin versions which are currently en route.
I bought the unassembled version as happy to solder stuff. I will report back
on how successful they are with the Voyager.

The person I bought from was Jacob from Androda. There was an issue re
shipping to the U.K. as he does not normally due to the new VAT rules relating
to small purchases changing if shipping for outside of the U.K. I am VAT
registered in the U.K. which means he does not have to get involved, so was
happy to ship to me.

Peter

Sent from my iPad

> On 28 Jan 2022, at 09:15, Peter Stokes <peter at ashlyn.co.uk> wrote:
> o;?Hi
>
> Anyone used either of these on the 40 pin SCSI used in the Voyager?
>
> From memory it is the same as the PowerBook 40 pin?
>
> Peter
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
>> On 28 Jan 2022, at 01:02, Madeline Autumn-Rose <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
>>
>> o;?On Thu, 27 Jan 2022, Richard wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Folks
>>> Just thought I would highlight a project (I have no connection with it)
> that I
>>> have come across called RaSCSI https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI
>>> <https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI> and
>>> https://github-wiki-see.page/m/akuker/RASCSI/wiki/Setup-Instructions
>>> <https://github-wiki-see.page/m/akuker/RASCSI/wiki/Setup-Instructions>
> there
>>> is an image for Raspberry Pi and
>>> the Cards are available from Tindie which is where I got mine from. They
> are
>>> of seemingly reasonable quality and arrived well packed. It was as simple
> as
>>> download image, burn to SD Card, insert in RPi, attach RaSCSI Card,
connect
> to
>>> network, power on and then manage through the webGUI.
>>> Supports things like
>>> - different configurations (i.e. one for your Sun, Mac, X68000, Amigab&)
>>> - Attaching disk image files as SCSI ID0..7
>>> - Image file library management
>>> - Attach an ethernet device
>>> - upload/download files
>>> - Share over apple share
>>> - create CD-ROM Image file
>>> - create empty disk image file
>>> - create Named drives
>>> - log to syslog
>>> In esccence it allows me to emulate, HDD, CD-ROM, MO, SCSI-Ethernet
>>> I am using one with one of my SS20 and another with my Sharp X68000 (also
> does
>>> SASI)
>>> Anyway thought I would mention as it has been really useful being able to
>>> mount CDbs from remote, try out/recover different OS from HDD images,
> etc.
>>> Cheers
>>> Richard
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
>>
>> Do you know if you can do non-standard SCSI block sizes for it? I need
> 584-byte sector size stuff and that's not as common.
>>
>> --
>> Madeline Autumn-Rose
>> http://gewt.net Personal stuff
>> http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects
>> _______________________________________________
>> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue