[HN Gopher] BlueSCSI - Open, Low Cost, DIY SCSI to SD Device - T...
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BlueSCSI - Open, Low Cost, DIY SCSI to SD Device - TinkerDifferent
Author : tambourine_man
Score : 23 points
Date : 2021-12-11 12:59 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tinkerdifferent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tinkerdifferent.com)
| dark-star wrote:
| BlueSCSI, RaSCSI, SCSI2SD... there's plenty of these projects
| recently. All have pro's and con's so consider them thoroughly
| sponaugle wrote:
| I have a couple of SCSI2SD v6s in my Indy and Alphastation, and
| they work well. I'll have to give one of these BlueSCSIs a try.
| The SCSI2SD got much faster in v6, as the earlier ones were
| pretty slow.
|
| The combination of these kinds of SCSI emulators and cards like
| the XT-IDE really make vintage computers available to more
| people.
| snvzz wrote:
| Wrong headline. From the repository:
|
| >Hardware is licensed sperately under CC Attribution-
| NonCommercial 4.0 International. Refer to `hw/README.md`.
|
| Therefore, despite claims of "open hardware", it is actually not
| so (not OSHW). A shame.
|
| This seems to be fully intentional, as the site goes on to
| provide a list of "authorized" sellers. If you're not one of
| these "authorized" sellers, then you cannot legally make and sell
| this hardware.
| helfire wrote:
| Creator here. I wanted to give people the ability to have the
| ability to print them out for personal use or buy from a
| seller. Early in the project someone attempted to commercially
| take it over so I chose this licenses. Is it perfect? no. You
| can of course design your own, but mine are provided under that
| license. See some projects like Elastic, Sentry, etc have run
| into similar licensing issues when trying to provide something
| to the community for free.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Hello,
|
| Thank you for distributing the designs. The choice of license
| is completely yours to make.
|
| That is what the comment above should have said instead of
| complaining.
| snvzz wrote:
| I take no issue with you choosing whatever license you want.
| It's your own work, after all.
|
| My dissatisfaction is only with the Open Hardware claim,
| present and prominent in what I assume is your website[0]. It
| has a definition[1], and your choice of license does not meet
| it.
|
| I do not wish for the meaning of Open Hardware to be diluted,
| thus the comment.
|
| [0]: https://scsi.blue/
|
| [1]: https://www.oshwa.org/definition/
| helfire wrote:
| I've never heard of OSHWA. I agree with the other reply
| that Open Hardware seems to be a pretty generic phrase.
| polpo wrote:
| "Open hardware" is a pretty generic term and OSHWA doesn't
| have a monopoly over how people use it.
| opan wrote:
| This same weak argument gets used against "open source",
| and while I strongly prefer "free software", I still
| think it's ridiculous how much people make this claim.
| Get your own terms. Stop trying to make the world a worse
| place for those who care about freedom, please.
| bogantech wrote:
| Who is it making the world worse for besides the leeches
| who take it and sell it?
| snvzz wrote:
| Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms,
| testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This
| is true regardless of Open Hardware.
|
| I therefore do not see anything wrong with selling Open
| Hardware.
|
| As everybody can do this, the hardware itself is
| commoditized, and society at large does benefit.
| bogantech wrote:
| > Making PCBs, soldering components, flashing roms,
| testing, selling and shipping hardware takes effort. This
| is true regardless of Open Hardware.
|
| It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB,
| have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x
| the cost than it is to do the initial design.
|
| It seems rare to get any contributions back to hw
| projects (either in pull requests etc or donations) so
| it's unsurprising when I see talented people give up or
| go with non commercial licenses.
|
| The usefulness I find in open source projects is the
| ability to learn, fix things etc
| rasz wrote:
| >It's a lot easier to upload some zip files to JLCPCB,
| have them assemble it and then sell them on eBay for 4x
| the cost than it is to do the initial design.
|
| but the author of BlueSCSI didnt do that initial design
|
| "BlueSCSI created by erichelgeson is a fork of ArdSCSino-
| stm32" https://github.com/erichelgeson/BlueSCSI
| rsync wrote:
| Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and
| useful ?
|
| Which is to say, one would attach a 2.5" SSD as the SATA device
| rather than a SD device ...
|
| I have such an adaptor:
|
| http://www.acard.com/index.files/Page613.htm
|
| ... although I am not sure if they are produced anymore.
|
| I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing the
| relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the end is
| 50pin SCSI ...
| Maursault wrote:
| > Wouldn't a SCSI <--> SATA device be much more performant and
| useful ?
|
| No. BlueSCSI and other SCSI device emulators are intended for
| use with SCSI-1 (narrow) and SCSI-2 (fast) controllers, maybe
| even Wide SCSI-2 (fast wide) for some, so the maximum bandwidth
| here is 5, 10 and 20 MB/s, respectively. Secure Digital is a
| pretty good match for bandwidth and in many if not most cases
| saturates the bus. Even if you had a SCSI to NMVe SSD adapter,
| it would never perform faster than the old bus it's running
| off.
|
| > I am also not sure if there is any point at all in discussing
| the relative speeds of SD vs. SSD when the bottleneck at the
| end is 50pin SCSI ...
|
| Sometimes the bottleneck is the CPU. In some popular vintage
| classic machines, on a very good day, the bandwidth of the RAM
| is almost 15MB/s.
| rvense wrote:
| AFAIK no old Mac will do 5MB/s on its built-in, external
| SCSI.
| Maursault wrote:
| That's the maximum bandwidth for narrow SCSI-1, used in
| anything from Mac Plus to 68030 machines. The external
| SCSI, a separate bus, is always SCSI-1. Sometimes the
| internal SCSI is SCSI-2 (some 68040 & PPC Macs). WGS95 had
| a wide SCSI card (so had 3 separate SCSI busses, narrow,
| fast, and fast wide).
|
| Reportedly, with any of the SCSI emulators, it is not
| difficult to saturate a narrow SCSI bus with a 68030 Mac,
| so... it will do exactly 5MB/s on narrow SCSI in these
| cases.
| krallja wrote:
| I have a BlueSCSI for booting my Macintosh SE. It boots in
| seconds, which was definitely not the case when I had 20MB of
| spinning rust.
|
| Also, Finder in System 6.0.8 supports 2GB volumes just fine --
| but shows it as "59,592K in disk 2,009,792K available." Didn't
| even implement the M suffix!
| tus666 wrote:
| Used one in a Mac Quadra recently. Works well. Much cheaper than
| the alternatives too.
| riedel wrote:
| Seems similar to https://github.com/akuker/RASCSI. Would be great
| if there was also the other way around. It seems that usb to SCSI
| adapters aren't manufactured anymore due to the lack of
| controller chips although it is all similar at protocol level.
| snvzz wrote:
| BlueSCSI seems to be a rebrand of
| https://github.com/ztto/ArdSCSino-stm32.
|
| edit: Some improvements were added.
| helfire wrote:
| We list that right on the github/top of the page linked.
| Speed/stability improvements, adding CD support, Macintosh
| specifics, easier config/use, documentation, community, etc.
| Checkout the repo for more info.
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(page generated 2021-12-11 23:02 UTC)