Ozzuneoj wrote on Today, 04:59:

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent […]
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dionb wrote on Yesterday, 20:25:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-23, 02:26:

[...]

The only other thing that stood out to me is the one 8bit ISA card is marked "Floptical", but I think it might just be SCSI... which is, again, not worth a lot or hard to find.

It looks like it has a bootROM. 8b bootable SCSI cards seem very sought-after. I was looking for one a while ago and couldn't find anything under EUR 150. So I got a Future Domain non-bootable controller and added the ROM myself 😉

If that card is bootable and particularly if it also supports large drives, it could be something of a unicorn. I can't make any of that out though from the pic.

Interesting! I hadn't thought of that. I've never really done anything with SCSI drives or controllers, though I have in recent years accumulated some of both... I don't know if there are any 8bit SCSI cards with a ROM though.

Two questions though...

First, how did you add a ROM to one that didn't have one? Did it already have a location or a socket for a ROM, or did you have to add one in a more "creative" way? 😁
Nevermind! I found your thread here! Nice work! 😁

Second, what are the benefits of going with SCSI vs going with IDE on a retro PC these days? If you have SCSI drives on hand and want to use them that's understandable, but it seems that SCSI poses some challenges and limitations... mainly that it's so difficult and expensive to get modern solid-state replacements for SCSI devices. Where as IDE controllers can often be hooked up to either a CF card on a simple adapter or a SD card on a more complex (possibly finicky) adapter.

I have hung onto a bunch of SCSI stuff in case I ever ended up needing it, but so far I've always been able to go IDE for anything I've worked on. I'm curious to know what the benefits are these days.

SCSI was created as a high-performance data bus. During its time, it was superior to the other hard drive interfaces because it had faster data transfer speeds. With SCSI, it was designed to be able to connect multiple devices to it, as long as it was properly terminated.