SCSI2SD, The SCSI Hard Drive Emulator for retro computing.

Traditional hard drives last 5 years*. Maybe, if you're luckly, you'll get 10 years of service from a particular drive. The lubricants wear out, the spindles rust. SCSI2SD is a modern replacement for failed drives. It allows the use of vintage computer hardware long after their mechanical drives fail. The use of SD memory cards solves the problem of transferring data between the vintage computer and a modern PC (who still has access to a working floppy drive ?)

*All statistics are made up.

Features

In-built active terminator.
Emulates up to 4 SCSI devices
Supports sector sizes from 64 bytes to 8192 bytes
Firmware updatable over USB
Highly configurable over USB
    Selectable SCSI ID
    Selectable parity support
    Enable/disable Unit Attention Condition
    Artificial limits on the SCSI disk size (eg. limit size to 4G to avoid OS bugs) 
    Sector size (can also be set via the SCSI MODE SELECT command, as sent by SCSI format utilities).

Technical Specifications

SCSI Interface SCSI-2 Narrow 8-bit 50-pin connector. Supports asynchronous transfers only. Micro SD Card Interface Standard microSDSC (1GB maximum size) microSDHC, microSDXC Communication is via the SPI protocol at 25MHz. USB Interface (firmware updates and config) USB 2.0 micro-B Power 5V via standard molex drive connector USB or self-powered using the SCSI host termination power. (v5 only) Dimensions 10cm x 5cm x 1.5cm (v5) 10cm x 10cm x 1.5cm (v3, v4)

Performance

As currently implemented:

Transfer size: 512 2048 8192 65536

read: 2MB/s 2.1MB/s 2.5MB/s 2.6MB/s write: 125kB/s 441kB/s 1.5MB/s 2.3MB/s

Tested with a 16GB class 10 SD card, via the commands:

WRITE TEST

sudo dd bs=${SIZE} count=100 if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX oflag=dsync

READ TEST

sudo dd bs=${SIZE} count=100 if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null

Compatibility Computer systems

Mac LC-III and LC-475
Mac II running System 6.0.8
Mac SE/30
Apple IIgs using Apple II High Speed SCSI controller card (from v3.3)
Symbolics Lisp Machine XL1200, using 1280 byte sectors (from v3.4)
PDP-11/73 running RSX11M+ V4.6
Microvax 3100 Model 80 running VMS 7.3 (needs patch against v3.5.2 firmware)
Amiga 500+ with GVP A530
Commodore Amiga 500 KS 1.3 with Oktagon 508 SCSI-2 controller
Amiga 2000 (B2000 rev 6.4 ECS) with DKB RapidFire SCSI 1 card
Amiga 4000 equipped with CyberStorm PPC using 68pin adapter.
Atari TT030 System V
Atari TT running TOS 3.06 with HDDRIVER software version 9.06
Atari MEGA STE
    needs J3 TERMPWR jumper
    1GB limit (--blocks=2048000). The OS will fail to read the boot sector if the disk is >= 1GB.
Atari Falcon, TOS 4.02, HDDRIVER 9.06 driver
Sharp X68000
    SASI models supported. See gamesx.com for information on building a custom cable.
    needs J3 TERMPWR jumper
    Set to SCSI ID 3. ID0 will not work. 
Compaq XP-1000 Professional Workstation
    Alpha 21264 CPU, 667MHz, with a QLogic SCSI controller in a PCI slot 
SCSI-based Macintosh Powerbooks (2.5" SCSI2SD)
    Also reported to work on Thinkpad 860 running Win NT 4.0 PowerPC.
AT&T 3B2/600
Sun 2/120 Workstation (Unit Attention disabled)
Data General MV/2500DC running AOS/VS
    Vendor: MICROoP
    Product: 1578-15       UP
    Revision: DG02
    Device-type modifier: 0x4c
Applix 1616
IMS MM/1
NeXTcube + NeXTSTEP 3.3
NeXTStation
Modified geometry settings are required to avoid "cylinder group too large" errors while formatting.
	(To simulate Quantum Fireball 1050S)
    512 bytesPerSector
    139 sectorsPerTrack
    4 tracksPerCylinder
    4135 cylinder per volume
    1 spare sector per cylinder
    2051459 usable sectors on volume

Samplers

Roland JS-30 Sampler
Akai S1000, S3200, S3000XL, MPC 2000XL, DPS 12
    SCSI cable reversed on S3200
    There are compatibility problems with the Akai MPC3000. It works (slowly) with the alternate Vailixi OS with multi-sector transfers disabled. 
EMU Emulator E4X with EOS 3.00b and E6400 (classic) with Eos 4.01
EMU E6400 w/ EOS2.80f
EMU Emax2
Ensoniq ASR-X, ASR-10 (from v3.4, 2GB size limit)
    ASR-10 Requires TERMPWR jumper (applies to pre. 5.0 SCSI2SD boards only)
    ASR-X resets when writing to devices > 2Gb. 
Kurzweil K2000R
    See kurzweil.com for size limits which a dependant on the OS version. Older OS versions have a 1GB limit.
    SCSI cable reversed 
Casio FZ-20M
    Requires TERMPWR jumper. The manual shows the pin25 of the DB25 connector is "not connected".
    May require scsi2sd-config --apple flag 
Yamaha A5000, A3000, EX5, EX5R 
EMU ESI4000

Other

HP 16601A, 16700A logic analyzers
Fluke 9100 series 
Reftek RT-72A Seismic datalogger.
	http://www.iris.iris.edu/passcal/Reftek/72A-R-005-00.1.pdf
	http://www.iris.iris.edu/passcal/Manual/rtfm.s3a.13.html
Konami Simpson's Bowling arcade machine
	http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?p=3027446