First post, by CursedSilicon
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all, long time lurker, relatively new poster, etc
I've got a large collection of Sun Microsystems machines from around the turn of the millennium (Netras, a SunFire 420 and others)
The machines all still have their original SCSI based drives, albeit in unknown condition. However given the machines are nearly 25~ years old and mechanical hard drives are, well, mechanical. It would be nice to replace them with something more reliable
StarTech make a SATA to IDE adapter that works wonders in machines that can take IDE (and unlike the cheap clones, actually seems to handle DMA modes properly, not just PIO!)
Over in the early Macintosh world there's a plethora of SCSI emulator devices (Raspberry SCSI, BlueSCSI etc) however these are significantly lower speed SCSI devices. Capping out at about 10MB/s from what I've been able to find online. Plenty fast for an original Macintosh from 1984 of course!
The Suns I have all appear to handle either "SCSI Ultra160" or "Ultra320" (for 160 and 320MB/s respectively) which also comes with its own "similar but different" connector
Is there anything out there for adapting modern SATA to SCSI Ultra interfaces? As I understand it the two are "reasonably" similar (though not identical) protocols.
As an aside I also purchased a https://firmtek.stores.turbify.net/sata1ve2plus2.html 64-bit PCI-X to SATA II expansion card for future testing
This device is the only one seemingly in existence (or at least, still in *production*) that sports OpenFirmware rather than a PC BIOS Option ROM. This allows it to operate as an (extremely quick!) boot drive for older Macintoshes, even under MacOS 9.2. Due to its use of OpenFirmware, it may also be compatible with Sun machines as well as other vendors that implemented OpenFirmware. However adapting the devices SCSI cages to SATA would be a rather destructive process, and limit me to only 2 (or 4) drives at maximum.