[rescue] SCSI Replacements (was: IDE SSDs? I never knew...)

[Michael Dombrowski]

Agree with all of your points. I love my pi pico devices. I also have a PiSCSI which is very useful for experimenting and getting a working setup before transitioning to ZuluSCSI. 

I need a couple more ZuluSCSI devices but heard a rumour of a new hardware revision so I'm holding off for a bit...

> On Jun 28, 2024, at 9:28 AM, Mark Benson via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
> 
> Splitting the thread as we’re drifting off-topic a wee bit.
> 
> I refer to them as “Emulators” because they are not a raw SCSI device. While they do work to all intents and purposes like a real SCSI block device the modern versions “virtualise” the block device images, allow up to 6 devices from a single card and even support hot-swap if all the LUNs are unmounted. This to me puts this function of the device more into Emulator territory as the controller is doing more than just pretending to be one device.
> 
>> On 27 Jun 2024, at 23:11, Jonathan Chapman via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org> wrote:
>> 
>>> I don't really get the discrepancy, unless it was a price thing. They are functionally very similar, the only major difference being the extras for Mac users on the BlueSCSI.
>> 
>> Last time I talked to Alex Perez, he'd said they had improved a lot of base features in the BlueSCSI firmware, but that it was of course open source, so I'd expect it to be integrated back in...unless there's still too much drama between the two for that or something silly.
> 
> What I meant was I wasn’t sure was why Dave found such a big issue with one and not the other unless it was a while back and he had an early firmware version of the BlueSCSI.
> 
>> I haven't used or looked at the codebase for either, so I can't offer more than what Alex told me.
> 
> I use both, BlueSCSIs on the classic Mac side and ZuluSCSI on my Amigas. I have benchmarked BlueSCSI v1 and v2 and a ZuluSCSI 2040 (latest 2040 microcontroller version). Blue SCSI v1 with recent firmware holds up at about 4-5MB/s which ain’t quick admittedly. The BlueSCSI v2 and ZuluSCSI 2040 both hold up at a tidge over 9MB/s which will keep a Narrow SCSI-II bus busy all day long.
> 
> Overall both versions of the newer Pi 2040 based boards are really impressive devices and make managing old SCSI systems very tolerable, even helping out when the CDROM is dead. It also makes testing various setups a doddle as you can just pull the SD card and rename a file and you’ve swapped drives, effectively. If you keep stuff on removable media images (Zip, MO etc) BlueSCSI even lets you eject them and swap the card in and out in the fly.
> 
> —
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
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