[rescue] Various machines for sale

[Joshua Boyd]

On 1/9/25 00:59, Dave McGuire via rescue wrote:
>
>
>> There are also new SCSI Ethernet adapters.  These things aren't at 
>> the level of performance and capability that I'd like, but they are 
>> heading in interesting directions, and I hope they will get there.  I 
>> wish I had the time to dedicate to working on that sort of hardware.
>
>   They've been there for a while.  The newer ones, like the ZuluSCSI 
> RP2040, can saturate an 8-bit SCSI bus.

I have my eye on wanting Fast or Ultra scsi, and maybe expanding out to 
a 16 bit bus.  My hope is that the RP2350A can go faster, and maybe the 
RP2350B can take it to 16 bits.


>   I didn't know about SCSI Ethernet adapters.  That's neat.

https://github.com/BlueSCSI/BlueSCSI-v2/wiki/WiFi-DaynaPORT

Generally these are being aimed at Macs and they are made to be 
DaynaPORT compatible so that new drivers aren't needed.  I think they 
typically are made to use Wifi instead of actual Ethernet, but I know 
I've seen some people talking about doing wired Ethernet as God intended.

Here is one: https://github.com/PiSCSI/piscsi

And it looks like this is one that does real ethernet.  This is based on 
a the full Pi, not the RP2040s, so I could see it be harder to get this 
doing to higher speeds than non-fast narrow SCSI.

Although, some of the PIO functionality of the RP2040 is being opened up 
for the RP1 on the Pi5, so there may be some options for more capability 
there.  Personally, I'm dreaming of being able to use the Pi5 to talk to 
a 16 audio channel TDM interface. I probably should start with the 
RP2350 talking to a simpler device though.

>
>> There certainly aren't much in the way of options for brand new SCSI 
>> spinning hard drives.  Nor SCSI optical drives.  Personally, I'm not 
>> overly bummed as I'm much rather various SSD options over spinning 
>> rust, and I mostly only use optical drives for ripping their 
>> content.  I am not trying to make a SS20 be my main file server 
>> hosting a 40TB file system, although that would be cool, and I kinda 
>> would like to try it.
>
>   I do detest that term; it has never been "rust".  Apparently you've 
> not yet been bitten by the comparatively very short lifetimes of even 
> high-end SSDs.  I have, and I strongly prefer spinning drives for 
> storing anything that can't be easily replaced.  So, NVMe for system 
> disks, arrays of spinning drives for irreplaceable (like 
> locally-generated, not movies and PDFs that I can just re-download) data.


I've never been bitten by that because I continue to do my main data 
storage and most backups on hard disks.

My desire for an SSD storage server is part of my desire to get back to 
working straight off network storage instead of moving everything back 
and forth between local storage and the server.