You know when all the pieces are right there, but it takes you a while to realise the bigger picture?
In October I was reunited with a Blue and White Power Mac G3. This machine was a big part of my childhood, and one that I bought second-hand in the early 2000s before having to sell it when finances were tight. It had an early revision motherboard, which if you know your Power Mac G3s means it comes with the troublesome IDE controller. It’s fine for the optical and Zip drives, but modern storage can present issues. The conventional wisdom is to use a separate storage controller with a 64-bit PCI connector to take advantage of the additional available bandwidth.
I’m a massive retro SCSI fan (it’s so much nicer than…
You know when all the pieces are right there, but it takes you a while to realise the bigger picture?
In October I was reunited with a Blue and White Power Mac G3. This machine was a big part of my childhood, and one that I bought second-hand in the early 2000s before having to sell it when finances were tight. It had an early revision motherboard, which if you know your Power Mac G3s means it comes with the troublesome IDE controller. It’s fine for the optical and Zip drives, but modern storage can present issues. The conventional wisdom is to use a separate storage controller with a 64-bit PCI connector to take advantage of the additional available bandwidth.
I’m a massive retro SCSI fan (it’s so much nicer than IDE), so naturally I went searching the auction sites for a SCSI controller with a Mac-compatible BIOS. I landed on this Adaptec AHA-3950U2B; note the “APPLE/MAC” on the white label:
It also says “Assembled in Singapore”. While I was born in Sydney to Australian and German parents, I like to think I was assembled in Singapore too. At least, that’s where my vocations all came from, and where I think I got to “know myself” as a kid when we lived there. Wow, this is getting philosophical lah, let’s bring it back.
Note the line I wrote in that post:
Enter the Adaptec AHA-3950U2B (geshunteit) Ultra-2 SCSI controller!
Ultra2. Huh. That’s interesting. Oh well, let’s use a standard 50-pin SCSI controller with a ZuluSCSI Blaster. That’ll be awesome!
And turns out, yes, it was awesome. The ZuluSCSI Blaster is the latest in the line of Raspberry Pi-based SCSI devices that can emulate hard drives, optical discs, even music CDs. The Blaster reportedly supports a read speed of up to 18 MB/sec. I haven’t done benchmarks, but it feels performant under Mac OS 8.6. The only thing that feels a bit sluggish are larger installs.
I have a post about this pending, once I do some more proper benchmarks. As an aside, anyone remember a good classic Mac OS drive benchmark tool?
Anyway, recently I was telling a friend about the ZuluSCSI Blaster’s awesome new optional audio interface, when I went to the Rabbit Hole Computing page and saw they also now sell a ZuluSCSI Wide with, get this, Ultra2 support!
ZuluSCSI Wide supports Ultra Wide synchronous and asynchronous SCSI transfers, with read speeds up to 34 megabytes/second. A sufficiently-fast SD card and SCSI controller with Wide or Ultra Wide SCSI support is required to achieve maximum throughput.
Huh! Provided I have the right industrial card, I could get almost twice the read performance. Random and sequential writes would be more interesting to me, but now I kinda want to get one to try and compare. Then I could shuffle the ZuluSCSI Blaster (and my earlier BlueSCSI) down the chain into my older PCs, or even the Apple //e when I get a controller for that.
When I say that in some ways we’re living through the “golden age of retrocomputing” now, this is what I mean. Sure prices have gone way up since the days when I could get a Commodore 16 for the price of lunch, but there is so much cool new kit out to breathe new life into old machines we care about. It’s awesome.