Using 90's tech to connect SCSI devices to modern computers in 2022
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- čas přidán 25. 02. 2022
- #usb #scsi
Back in the 80s and 90s, it was common to use SCSI devices on Macintosh and Amiga computers. Can we use these on Windows 10 and MacOS in 2022?
--- Info
Microtech XpressSCSI USB to SCSI adapter
Belkin USB to SCSI Adapter
Shuttle eUSCSI Bridge
Castlewood ORB SCSI to USB adapter
--- Video Links
RaSCSI project and an issue about giving it a similar feature to this device:
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DD for windows:
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"It freakin' works!" -Adrian's standard reaction :)
Trying to remember, MOST SCSI controllers were set to ID 7. I wonder if for some reason, that interface uses ID 1.
I saw a 7 in the long device string under windows, so I think it's 7 as was 99.9% of host adapters. Either way I'm glad I figured out the trick.
I think Adrian makes a point of saying it now because we're all expecting it :)
*Parallel* SCSI might be dead, but SCSI itself is still very much alive in the form of iSCSI, SAS, UAS and USB Mass Storage, &c.
Don't forget iSCSI and Fiber Channel, which is just "really fast packetized SCSI"
AND its all a cluttered mess. This is one instance where the streamlined consumer standards surpassed the pseudo professional standard. IDE/PATA might have been a mess at the beginning (reflection, timing,...) but the standard ripened quickly and drives in excess of 400GB were becoming available fast. And SATA 150/300/600 was the final strike, the cluttered franken U.2 connector is another bad example of pseudo server grade standard. Anyway, I'm no friend of NVME M.2 as its a mess too with its horrible keying A, E, B, M but its the future, size wise, speed wise, feature wise.
@@williamtopping : Yes and honestly I intensly dislike it! Usb 2.0 and its various connectors Ok, Usb 3.0 and its various connectors... okaaay. Usb C, nope, usb 3.x genx nope, Usb thunderdolt... NOPE.
Usb PD 5, 9, 14, 19, 25, 50... Nope. Stay with 5V, if a device needs power, have separate appropriate power connector. I dislike that ATARI 5200 BS with video and power in one cable.
@@indrora "Don't forget Fiber Channel" No, let's forget that. Fiber Channel was a dark part of storage history. So many failures due to bad design. :)
When you go into device manager in Windows there are often things showing as SCSI. There are of course a bunch of things in there that you might never guess what they are for if they weren't categorized.
The reason they banged on the iMac was it took SCSI ports, serial and ADB ports off the computer, but if you were a dedicated Mac user you probably had SCSI peripherals like external drives and scanners that you needed until you could get USB stuff. These were quite valuable for that reason.
I can a test to that I had a Science teacher who was a Mac fanatic and had like ten or more of these cables. And she owned at least one of each model you listed. If I recall the HD micro tech model is a USB 2.0 version of the cable and does give "faster" more consistent speeds. and yes if you can get one to work you could get all to work.
I wish someone made an ADB to USB adapter that worked with Joysticks
@@BushidoBrownSama Does the old iMate not work for that? I have one that connects my Apple Extended Desktop II Keyboard and an old trackball.
Nothing beats a _Que! Drive_ with swappable side panels, to change from Bondi Blue to whatever fruit color iMac you had!
Notice how nearly all the early USB peripherals came in translucent blue or other bright colours: it was so they would look good next to an Imac, rather than a boring beige Microsoft-compatible PC.
I'll admit I'm not entirely surprised that it works just fine on modern systems. USB Mass Storage *is* SCSI after all, USB to SCSI adapters are much simpler internally than USB to ATA adapters, they basically just have to pass data through in both directions.
I wonder if non-storage SCSI works with this or if it just maps usb storage class to scsi storage and nothing else is possible
@@JuliaMono there is a separate specification for plain SCSI over USB, so *maybe*, but I suspect its going to be mass storage
@@FrankGevaerts Cool, I didn't know that. Thanks :)
And on that note, I wish more devices, especially those converting to storage technologies (SATA/SAS/MMC) would tunnel the protocols more cleanly than put an abstraction into it. I know it makes sense because it makes diver and interface implementations much more easy but the times I had to interact with devices using the lower level aspects of the storage interface and USB Adapters just ate part of the communication, intercepted and changed it or did their own thing all were quite frustrating. No manufacturer claimed this should work but still...
I used SCSI very much in the nineties on my PC using an Adaptec 2940 controller. If bus termination was right, there were much less problems as with IDE. SCSI-HDDs were very reliable. I still have an Adaptec 29160 controller in my Windows 10 PC, connected via a PCIe to PCI adapter, to read my 25 years old HDDs and DDS tapes. It simply works.
I like the idea that the old SCSI command set survived in so many technologies, such as SAS, USB mass storage, ...
Considering how fast technology became obsolete, I always find it funny that modern tech can still use ancient hardware.
I've got 3 SCSI drives, two 4Gig and one 8Gig with files and music that I've lost to the sands of time.
Sadly I do not have any devices that allow me to access them.
You're lucky that Windows 10 still supports your card. It does not for My Adaptec 2940UW
@@galier2 I know. The 29160 and 29320 are the only Adaptecs where a signed 64 bit Windows7 driver can be found. But they are available on ebay.
@@admirerofclassicalelectron2858 I still had a Symbian Logic card of the same age with UWwhich was detected without issue in win10. So I didn't bother further to try to solve my problem. I was just surprized that the "Brand" card was abandoned but the noname Taiwan card still worked flawlessly.
@@galier2 Thanks, that's a valuable information. I don't own a Symbios Logic card, but I know where I can get one. Always good to have a second option.
You'd asked why we didn't see more of these adapters anymore and I think it's just a consequence of it being the nexus of
a) reading/imaging SCSI drives is the kind of thing you'd ask someone with technical know-how to do
b) the person in (a) is likely to look at their options and realize that it's easier to add a SCSI PCI card to a spare Linux box than buy one of these USB adapters (especially for scalper's prices)
When they were still new I'm sure you'd had a lot of semi-technical people that needed to do SCSI-to-iMac/non-SCSI PC migration but today it's like a niche within a niche.
Also: it looked like that dd error you'd seen happened at the end of the drive. It might have been that dd just 'ran off the end of the runway' as it was making that image rather than there being an error.
Great video as always!
The most sensational thing in this video is that Windows finally managed to estimate a time to completion correctly in version 10.
I don't think so..... its called windows time for a reason.... but I will live with it.... as we all have for Many Many years...
I love this kind of experimentation. Forcing legacy hardware onto modern OS.
One of the things I enjoy about this channel, is Adrian's joyous laughter when something works. Always cheers me up!
I could have guessed, but it never occurred to me that there's a dd version for Windows. I may just back up my Amiga CF card in the same way. Super useful!
1:26 on the high-end workstations the default standard was in fact SCSI; IBM, Silicon Graphics, Sun, besides Macs and Amigas all had variants of SCSI (wide, ultrawide, lvds with all sorts of adapters, terminators and IDs, along with thick strong cables)
Came to say this. I was surprised at the claim that SCSI wasn't big outside Mac and Amiga. I serviced plenty PCs with SCSI drives back in the day.
@@called2voyage the end consumer thru all the lifetime of pc was basically ide-atapi ; even the iomega for pc was parallel port (external) or ide internal; from the 2000 on I recall Adaptec selling "cheap" scsi pci card specifically for the Zip version, say if you had a Mac with external SCSI zip you could attach it to your pc via the adaptec scsi card+windows driver; but EVEN this card wont allow you to boot your pc from the iomega or any other scsi device; for that you needed some high end adaptec card with boot bios in it, which was expensive.
Only pcs I can recall with scsi built in interface were IBMs high end workstations, then the most expensive Suns, SGIs or HP Servers, mostly for RAID disks.But end consumers pc, no way.
SCSI on your Microsoft-compatible PCs was pretty hit or miss: a device would come with a small list of supported controllers, too bad if your SCSI card wasn’t on that list.
I used to say to my colleagues, if a SCSI device would work anywhere, it would work on a Mac.
@@lawrencedoliveiro9104 My initial tech days (after 8bit) were all SGI, coming from that I couldn't understand why SCSI was such a mess on PCs, and of course I was highly scornful of IDE. I think the first PC mbd I had any respect for was a dual-socket PIII XEON, probably a 440BX, which had two U2W ports on the board which worked just fine.
20 years later, I have a large collection of SCSI disks, plus FC and SAS. My first PC was a Dell Precision 650 with 3x 15K SCSI in hw RAID for the C-drive. :D
I must have said, "Whoa," out loud half a dozen times watching this. It just kept getting better every step. That is _so cool._
I love this old school data transfer with weird adapters stuff. It's usually a pain getting everything working, but once it's there, it's super satisfying
On the enterprise side, high-performance SCSI HDD systems were widely deployed.
Still do! The fastest IDE hdd I own is 10,000 rpm and I still have some 1 GB SCSI drives that spin at 15,000.
If you ever have a situation where you don't have working drivers for modern windows, it's very easy to set up a VirtualBox VM with e.g. Windows XP and route the USB device to that. You can also setup shared folders to easily transfer over any data or other stuff you might need to interact with the device. Much more convenient than using a seperate machine and USB dongle.
Saved me a couple of times with an old printer, and also with my super old IP security cam that only supported super old Internet Explorer.
or just fire up your Linux box which doesn't care how old drivers are
@@thesteelrodent1796 or Linux box which may not have drivers at all.
Hello, There is a Minolta film scanner and the seller offers exactly the same SCSI to usb adapter. Is this will work to my windows 10? Or in any case this adapters works on scanners in modern computer?
@@Andreassavvides78 i am trying to figure that out right now. I have the USB adapter, which seems to work, but WIN10 seems it might be limited to just Block devices (Hard drives) without the correct drivers.
Dude, that was awesome! I love getting different generations of hardware to talk to each other. So cool!
This is something that needs to make a comeback. I searched on eBay real quick and the only ones on there are in China and they are all WAY overpriced. Hopefully someone eventually designs one to work with modern machines. We 68k Mac guys REALLY need them! Great video as always!
yeah I just saw that one too, I was dissappointed I thought YES finally I can connect up all my old scsi stuff and just have it on my desk everywhere...lol.
Yeah - me too - started researching - none abailable - I did find the expensive one for like $275.00 plus some crazy shipping - Its gonna be a dig! - I am still looking
SCSI to USB is almost impossible to find these days. In fact I found it so hard that I ultimately gave up, imported a PCMCIA to SCSI card from Japan and then the relevant converters to make that work with a hard drive.
Your troubleshooting logic is infectious! Thank You
Your joy of connecting things to other things feels like a happy connecting to all of us. ExSCSI
USB MSC (Mass Storage Class standard) is actually tunneled SCSI commands through USB and all thumbdrives actually emulate the SCSI command set, just over USB requests instead of a SCSI electrical connection. So it's not too surprising that this adapter just implements MSC standard and as such should work out of the box.
I had a "It freakin' works!" moment as I managed to backup my old Amiga 1200 disk (IDE in my case) that has started making some clicking sounds using dd for windows! Thank you!
The original RaSCSI for Raspberry Pi shall support creating images of SCSI HDDs, I have not tested it myself but is part of the Japanese documentation mentioned as initiator mode..
You have to respect the legacy support in Windows it's very impressive! Hope someone can make a modern version of the adapter. Seems like something StarTech could offer since it's right up their alley.
Also I miss quality netbooks Chromebooks aren't the same!
The SCSI command set was baked into the USB mass storage specification. No legacy. Any USB drive still uses SCSI.
As another commenter implied, SCSI is far from dead, a lot of modern specifications just built on top of it, the default device names for disks in most *nix flavours, nowadays, are sdX, referring to "SCSI Device".
Thumbs up for a new version of the adapter, meh on the rest. Everyone else has already talked about "legacy", so I'll mention something about netbooks: they were _always_ meant to be cheap. The reason you don't see them anymore is that everyone complained that they were worse than more expensive laptops, so they eventually turned into _literally just normal laptops,_ at which point the name got dropped for being useless. If you want a "quality" netbook, then just buy a quality laptop- the difference was never major in the first place.
We use a ton of iSCSI with our SANs in our DCs.
Windows 10 has native support for serial mice. My Haswell-era motherboard has a serial port header for some reason (it's a gaming motherboard lol) and on a whim I tried plugging in my two button serial Microsoft mouse. It just worked!
That clear cable got my nostalgia engine running. :)
I'd imagine the adapter requiring ID 0 for the bare drives is because it does support daisy-chaining from what the manual said. If you're able, try using that SyQuest drive again as the first in the chain, and add a second device off of there as ID 1.
This
don't forget to properly terminate the bus. :-)
I never knew such a thing existed! I love how excited you got throughout this video LOL. Oh, I know it all too well, when all of the sudden, our experiments on our beloved retro machines just start working!
Always nice when a new Adrian's digital basement video appears.
This looks like a really useful device.
Currently stuck in hospital so nice to find one of your videos to distract me.
Not sure if someone has mentioned this in the comments but there could well be an issue with device 1 as the SCSI adaptor itself could be calling itself device 1. Try 2+ and if they all work that would confirm this. I beleive this is why SCSI allows 7 devices, it's actually 8 but the controller itself is always one of them (or something like that - it's been a long time).
OMG I've literally been looking into doing this very thing all this week and then you release a video about it.. amazing.
For Linux it might have been worth using a proper distro through a Live USB image.The Linux kernels on most smartphones I would imagine have a bunch of drivers not built when they are making the image.
The phone might have been unable to read the drive because it was formatted with NTFS
I do love old odd tech that just works in modern computers! This was an awesome lesson for me to learn!
Now, this was very useful. I have a bunch of 20 SCSI drives with load of Amiga and PC backups. With this I can for sure make backups and save the data for the future! Thanks a lot Adrian.
Oh yeah, those clear cables are the bane of my life at work! A lot of our old Cisco network switches used them for the stacking cable between the switches, so years later we're replacing those switches and the cables have all turned yellow and sticky! And of course it was my job to pull out the old hardware, so after getting sticky hands from the first one, I went and bought a box of nitrile gloves to handle them.
You probably went through a lot of gloves until you'd stuck to the cables enough times to coat them in bits of glove. "Goo Gone" helps, naphtha works but not quickly. Alcohol seems to work at first but the moment the alcohol evaporates it's back to the way it was before.
@@mal2ksc It was more of a slimy stickiness rather than a tacky one, so they didn't tend to tear the gloves apart. After the first one they basically went directly into a plastic bag and into e-waste. Even if they could be cleaned easily and effectively, I wouldn't trust them to not turn gross again and annoy the next person who has to deal with them. And besides, some of those switches were over 10 years old, so you really don't want to trust them not to die out of the blue (which was one reason we started replacing them).
For goey cables and the fake rubber topping on mouse/sticks I use old diesel fuel, also works with kerosene and JP4 jetfuel… put on a fabric rag and rub/wipe strongly.
@@G_de_Coligny I highly recommend doing this outdoors and far away from smokers.
@@UpLateGeek or in a suited place like…
A workshop…
I had one of these back in the late 90’s back when Apple released the iMac G3 without SCSI support (only USB and later Firewire 400). Apple was discontinuing SCSI support in all it’s desktop and laptops of the time with the Powerbook G3 (bronze keyboard) being the last Mac to include an SCSI port (discontinued in Jan 2000.). My dad got an iMac G3 in like 1999 and I got a Berlin SCSI to USB with Term Power adaptor they made back then (now discontinued). You can still find the manual for it online on Belkin’s website. It, like many Mac compatible accessories of the era, came in a translucent plastic casing to match the translucent cases of the iMac G3, iBook G3, and Powermac G3 lineup of the era. Mine came in translucent green and white. I haven’t had a need to use ion a long time and I don’t know that I could get a driver for it that’s compatible with a modern Mac or PC for it so I’d have to most likely run it on legacy iMac G3/G4 hardware running an older version of macOS running the Mac OS 9 and early versions of Mac OS X. As you said in the vid, the Belkin model I have is indeed the same white label as yours (just rebranded) made by Shuttle Technologies for Belkin.
Very cool- not sure I ever saw one of these back in the day! Adrian always finds the coolest stuff!
Wow, SCSI to FireWire adapters are selling for $350-550 on eBay. SCSI to USB is similarly rare and expensive. I never would have imagined.
Big thumbs up, honestly I would never have expected this to work at all as must early USB devices don't talk USB mass storage, instead have really complicated and scary drivers that would never work on windows 10 or Mac. I mean you got it working on a freaking ARM Mac.. that's insane.
I started my SCSI adventures with my Amiga 4000 way way back and enjoyed every minute of this video, thanks!!!
I swear every time I wonder about something weird like this, Adrian makes a video about it like a week later lol. Thanks again Adrian!!!
I used lots of SCSI back in the day when I saw the performance difference between IDE vs SCSI. Running preemptive kernel OS's like UNIX and OS/2 really showed the performance differences. And remember, CDROMs were really slow back then too. Would love to find a solution to get into some of my old SCSI drives but as you mentioned, that adapter you showed runs around $180 online. Thanks for showing your trials and successes.
SAS controller with a connector adapter will let you hook up any SCSI family drive, and SAS understands SATA too. It's a much more universal solution that is also suitable for permanent hookup, rather than a crappy USB adapter that barely works
I wonder if this could be done with a simple 10$ Microcontroller supporting USB Mass storage. (Something like an STM32 BluePill Board). Bit-Bang the parallel SCSI if something appears at the USB ensldpoint
Interesting device. Very useful and functional for old SCSI devices and backing up data from old machines. “It freakin’ worked!!”. Always love that.
This is an issue that I deal with quite often, since I collect both UNIX workstations and 68k Macs. Thanks, Adrian!
Great video !!!! I remember in 1999 my first day at a new job a open the door of the server room and the SCSI HD was gone with all Autocad files !!!!!! My boss won't belived and get replacement was not easy but I was able to fix and install the windows server asap was difficult but i loved remember that day!!!!! thanks
Sometimes it's not about the destination, but the journey. Thanks for the content!
Always fascinating, what tech you're getting in your hands sometimes 😄👍! My two cents to clear up two minor details:
- Max disk transfer speed over USB 1.1: The max theoretical speed is 12 MBit = 1.5 MByte / second, but after all overheads, the best I've ever got effectively (from various thumbdrives/card readers/external hard disks) was _exactly_ 927 KBytes / second, sustained, with the occasional dip down from that (at least according to the file copy dialog of - I think Win98 at the time? Maybe not the best measurement tool in the world, but anyway...)
- That read error at the end of your dd image of the Amiga disk: if dd for Windows behaves anything like the Linux tool (and it should, after all 😄), there's nothing to worry about - you set your dd to a blocksize of 512k ("bs=512k", bigger block sizes than the standard - single bytes, I believe? - give you better transfer speeds), but after so-and-so-many blocks of that size, at the end of the hard disk there just aren't enough disk sectors left to fill up the 512k block, so you get what's there, plus the error message to your console. Perfectly normal behaviour, but if you're not used to it, it can throw you off way more than it should...
Thanks, and keep up the good work 👍!
I have this exact adapter in my box of odd USB peripherals... Never used it, don't even remember who gave it to me. Just stashed it away thinking one day it could be useful ;) It's funny to see it featured on a CZcams video!
I would buy it from you if affordably priced. I live in Texas
@@ramonsantiago1494 Sorry, not for sale
I seem to remember SCSI being a nightmare, even when you had native SCSI on your PC - Different connectors, different SCSI types and different termination requirements etc.
I guess it's a matter of familiarity, I don't exactly remember why I was fudging about with SCSI drives, but I do remember the different types, there was both a "speed" parameter and a "width" (referring to bus width, I assume), when you took that into consideration (and ofc, ID of the drive, but IDE kinda had that too, with the master/slave setup), it worked pretty well, in my experience.
Not really. You could have up to 7 devices on one cable. All you had to do was ensure the last one on the cable had the termination switched on. That's it. It was a lot more reliable than IDE, in fact, for years if you wanted a CD writer then it was SCSI or keep burning duds when IDE crapped out during the transfer. It wasn't until the "burn safe" drives that IDE became capable of doing a decent CD burn.
No more confusing than ST 506, ESDI, PATA, SATA...
Hmm. I remember SCSI being kind of awesome compared to all the alternatives at the time. That said you're right about the different types and connectors. It kind of grew some extra heads.
It sort of was. SCSI kept changing the physical and electrical characteristics, and I'm not entirely certain how much backwards compatibility existed. I still find it confusing.
As I remember there was the original 50 pin SCSI, then there's a 68 pin Wide SCSI, then there's low voltage differential, then there's fast SCSI. Then you can mix/match it all. Then you have to worry about active or passive termination, make sure you don't have different SCSI IDs on the same bus, and that the drive doesn't have the same ID as the controller.
Sheesh, all that just to connect your computer to a HD!
So yeah, compared to IDE, which had one connector (but evolving electrical and data transfer modes that were backwards compatible) SCSI was a lot more complicated. Parallel ATA you just plugged the thing in, and the hardware figured out how to talk to each other.
Hi Adrian!
As I watched your Video about your USB SCSI Hostadpter I started to remember some LSI Controller which only scanned for other id's if it found a device on id 0 and otherwise disabled the scan function. Perhaps the controller in the USB Dongle was developed with the same mindset. While I am writing this some other behaviour of Dell Servers sprung to mind which automatically adressed the controller on the first free id after the highest id of the bus.
SCSI brings back memories for me. Keep up the excellent work!
Wow, Cool nerdy video. Love it)) Thanks
The most genuine joy from a man (for the simplest of things) I've seen on CZcams in a long time... 😁👌26:27
My preferred method of recovering old drives from various systems is using ddrecover in Linux. I've had lot of success recovering almost error free disk images even from disks with lots of bad sectors.
Do you mean ddrescue?
@@eDoc2020 yes I do. quite right :-)
What strange timing - I finally returned to my computer room in the attic and rediscovered my SCSI disk collection. I've been thinking of ways to transfer the data over. Although I may just end up using the network as it'll probably be quicker. I do have a Belkin USB to SCSI HDSCSI somewhere and an Iomega USB to SCSI cable. I reckon I'll make a few videos about my results as I have about 1TB of data to transfer. Yes that is a lot of SCSI drives as the majority of them are 40Mb! IIRC the largest capacity single SCSI drive I appear to have is 146Gb...
Quite impressive. Thanks for sharing...
I could spend all week looking around Adrian's Digital Basement lol
Fantastic, i didn't know these devices existed!!
I love it when a plan comes together
I used scsi on all of my pcs up until about 2010- Once I figured out how it worked, I preferred it- I thought IDE was a joke
Ahhhhh the brand Microtech. Brings back memories of this $850 flat bed 11x17” scanner I once had that was over scsi 2. Wow
"looking for my dongle"
can't believe i'm not alone with that recurring problem,
LOL
I had a parallel port to SCSI1 adapter, it worked great on single and bidirectional parallel ports under DOS and windows.
Awesome video, Adrien! I got a chuckle out of all the Win98 stuff then you realizing it did work on Win10! 🤣
Adaptec had a version of this (USBXChange) and even one with usb 2.0 (USB2XChange). I remember buying this brand new to hook up my SCSI scanner and I thought it was the jankiest thing… I always regretted tossing it especially for how much they go for these days.
Gosh that brings back 90s memories of connecting external SCSI drives and cd writers using DB25.. :D
Cool Video Adrian
In circumstances where old hardware wouldn't work under Win10, I've had good outcomes by setting up Virtual Machines and using USB passthrough from the host to the VM.
This way, it should just work in the VM with the original driver disks and you can avoid having to dig up an old pc.
Around 1997 the first affordable CD writers were SCSI. Fast scsi 2 in my case. So some friends had a dc-2974 controller in desktop systems . 25 years later they still provide windows 10 drivers! What a support.
About the error the 'dd' command line tool gave on the read: At least the *nix dd always stops whenever it can't read, or write, the next block. The most common cause of that error is that it has reached the end of a device, and so the next block doesn't even exist. If you got the right number of blocks, everything worked perfectly!
I was watching the video and was literally just about to comment that I would like to see you test it on macOS when you tested it on macOS! Thanks! I wish I had one of these adapters. I have an old Iomega Bernoulli drive and a bunch of disks that I don't have any way of accessing anymore. Unix servers (Sun, DEC, SGI, etc.) back in the day pretty much all used some form of SCSI. Windows servers that needed high disk bandwidth, too. It was mainly just consumer PCs that used IDE.
From my personal experience (im from Greece), back then SCSI was not uncommon in PC's but it was used for specific applications, and naming two of them here, mainly for early CD R/W drives and flatbed scanners (and similar devices like Fuji/Kodak film developing/printing machines). I had in 1996-97 a Pentium 120Mhz PC and a Agfa Snapscan fladbed scanner, which was connected via an ISA SCSI card. Later I installed a PCI Adaptec card. When my Agfa flatbed scanner died (in the mid'2000's) I sold the PCI Adaptec SCSI card to the owner of a photolab. He operated a Fujifilm machine which needed a SCSI interface and he could not find one.
Typically I would suggest using ddrescue instead of a normal dd, for this type of work. But I don't know if there's a ddrescue port for Windows. This is really the type of thing I'd try with Linux: data recovery, weird hardware that was popular enough to be oem'ed as a few brands but with no great windows drivers...
Backward compatibility is a godsend! 😁
I still have mine. It worked really well with Iomega’s Jaz and Zip drives, but not my Canon film scanner. A pity since the scanner was very high quality albeit slow. In the shift to PCI it cost more for a new SCSI adapter than a new USB scanner.
Was the scanner not recognised at all, or just no supported drivers? If the latter, maybe try again after installing the trial version of Hamrick's VueScan, which supports MANY old and no longer directly supported scanners.
@@davenewton9652 I ended up purchasing an Epson USB combo scanner. The Canoscan was a really good professional quality scanner, but really, really slow. The “prosumer” Epson scanner is way quicker and ended up good enough for my last book. In any event, this was about 10 years ago and I no longer remember the details (70 year-old brains). One of the things I really like about the Canoscan was the software. Much better than what came with the HP flatbed scanner.
I had a Zip drive at the time. Didn’t it work through the parallel port?
@@sylviam6535 The first version released was SCSI with the parallel port version released some months later. Eventually the internal IDE version was released and when my SCSI version died I replaced it with the latter which I still have. The parallel port version was slower, but also cheaper than the SCSI version if you purchased the drive with Iomega’s SCSI adapter. Most PC users didn’t possess a SCSI port unless they were using other SCSI devices, such as scanners, CD drives, hard drives etc. The fastest IDE drive I ever owned was a 10,000 rpm Raptor while 15,000 Seagate SCSI drives were common in servers/workstations in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
@@jonathansturm4163 - Thanks for that. I knew that the IDE version existed, but not the SCSI version.
The website is still up, and man is it reminiscent of late 90s early 00s websites.
I have an early USB Microtech scanner and it still works great!
I tried the website and it still works.
When you are looking for a driver that isn't readily available, get the device hardware ID from device manager and search for it in the Microsoft catalog. You'll usually want to start with putting the whole ID in, and back off from the end of the ID to the character before each ampersand until you find a search result, e.g. the rev number is often at the end, and you'll usually want to remove that, hit search and keep backing off from there if no results are found. I usually extract the files from the cab instead of installing the cab directly so I can test if the driver is actually correct.
Very cool this all worked as well as it did and agreed, it'd be cool if there was a modern replacement for it as these are expensive / hard to find.
Just FYI, the Trantor T-348 (possibly T-358) MiniSCSI adapters can also cone in very handy when working with old machines. They connect to a PC parallel port and have both DOS and Linux drivers available.
I know there are often bridges and adaptors to connect two otherwise incompatible devices to each other. I think it is a nice thing they exist really. You never know when you might need one. I remember once connecting my parallel port printer to USB with a cheaply bought adapter cable. It worked flawlessly. Sadly not all adapters and bridges work so easily
I think the reason you don't see a lot of solutions that provide a SCSI adapter via USB is there's already good solutions available via cheap PCI/PCI-X cards that'll do this. You can still buy a cheap card new for like $35 that'll do SCSI. It'd still be nice if there were just an easy USB solution though.
There's generally Linux drivers available for these cards as well. Linux has supported the Amiga FFS for ages, so you can just directly mount the drive rather than having to copy it. It also supports HFS+, so you can also mount Mac drives directly as well. I managed to mount my old Amiga drive on Linux maybe a decade or so ago by doing this, and it was fairly painless.
One suggestion I had while viewing your video.... install Virtualbox on your bench PC, and put some old Windows OSes on them. Then you don't have to mess around with finding "some computer that has the right Windows OS installed". Which is the real problem with Windows, since it's a huge moving target over the last 20 years, so hardware becomes obsolete as they've changed their driver model so many times.
That's where the OSS model has shined. I can still just plug in a card from 1999 into a modern PC running Linux, and it "just works". No fuss, no muss, no messing around trying to find some sketchy driver from some weird website somewhere.
I was looking for one of these to hook up a film scanner to a modern PC, and they are quite rare and expensive. The other annoying thing I found out is that non-storage devices usually don't have 64 bit Windows drivers. External USB devices had long been supplanted by SCSI devices in the beginning of the 64-bit era, and no one bothered to spend the time and resources updating the drivers.
I also found it funny that the hard drive showed up as a Conner USB device, as they had been bought up before USB was established.
Anyway always enjoy your videos! Look forward to them every week!
I rigged up a Nikon Coolscan4000 firewire to a Windows 10 machine and if works great
Calling that 1800 now!!! I want that state of the art camera 😂
A while back I tried my Microsoft Sidewinder USB Force Feedback Wheel under Windows 10. It took some poking around to find the calibration wizard, but the wheel and the FF worked with Forza Horizon 4. Custom assigning the buttons was an issue because the wheel has fewer buttons than a modern gamepad, but the basic steering/gas/brake were fine.
As usual - awesome video, Adrian. I have a bunch of MO disks for my SCSI-connected Fujitsu MO drive. Adrian mentioned at 29:30, that it would be a great idea if the community would be so kind and set up an open source version based on the Raspberry or Arduino (more or less, a reverse RaSCSI) - I totally would appreciate that.
I am so happy you have done this! thank you so much for making this video. I have a pair of these usb to scsi adaptors and from the day I got them, I have failed to get them working correctly and it has really annoyed me rotten. I have a large pile of scsi drives I need to image/archive.
You are better off putting a pci adaptec 2940uw or some such card in a pc and archiving the drives with that,its will be much faster. the adaptec pci controllers can be had for $5-10 off Ebay used.
@@a4000t Initially I did! I cobbled a mini itx pc together, slapped windows xp pro on it, put in an scsi card and also had the ide ports hooked up. Winuae was used to create hard drive images. I even used HDDRegen to massage out any borked sectors just enough to get a perfect disk image. But the scsi side was a nightmare! I could get one drive to work, another would not. Then another drive would not complete after 10% etc it was driving me mad. The ide side was perfect I backed up a whole bunch of drives no problems. I tried quite a few different scsi cards, termination and id settings aswell. In the end I had to pack it all away. But now we have moved house im in a position to get all this stuff back out and crack on!
@@RetroJay1974 I wonder if you have some failing scsi drives. Most these things are 30+ years old now and i have seen alot of the drive electronics die as well as dry bearings and head problems on them.
When u try next time maybe use active termination at the end of the cable and disable all drive passive termination. The other problem could be lack of term power supplied sometimes.
@@a4000t I am thinking the same! they are just too old. I will continue the best I can. My ultimate goal is to image and then dispose of these old drives. Termination, I have bought in some adaptors and some more cabling. Just need some time to cobble it all together again.
That red netbook looks wicked : )
I've been looking for a USB to SCSI cable for a long time at a reasonable price - I'm super jealous!
I think one of the main reasons the adapter worked so well is just the fact that backwards compatibility was built into the SCSI interface, command set, and the USB standard as well. The drivers for the devices have more and more been included in later OS versions, so it doesn't have to search online for it. Unusual devices don't have that benefit, plus driver support of 32-bit on 64 and 16-bit on 32-bit OSes makes it harder as well.
Amazing result..regarding the Syquest drive, they are as reliable as a new BMW 1 Series hahaha so wont surprise that one not working haha. And is funny to see the SyQuest killer, the Iomega Jazz in the same episode hahaha
Jumping through lots of hoops, just to find one teeny weeny bit wrong is a common occurrence with projects like these. Nice feeling once you crack it tho! :-)
People who made that USB adapter can be really proud of themselves - they made good work. Wonder if they thought about that.. will it work 20+ years later without any problem on future tech so many years after :)
I used one of these with SCSI Zip and Jazz drives. We had SCSI macs and they allowed us to use one drive with both.
I think SCSI was only briefly common on IBM PC compatibles for early CD drive adopters, but then IDE/PATA made everything easier by the time more users jumped on the CD bandwagon. And regarding macOS recognizing it, I’ve been kinda surprised how many devices that only claimed to be Windows-compatible ended up working fine on my Mac immediately.
Thank you!
Nice! I came across a PCI SCSI card that I managed to get running in Windows 7 64 bit so I got my old Macintosh SCSI stuff to show up and I was able to access them with my emulators. I would have liked to use a USB option but I recall them being very expensive last time I looked for one. :(
Let me tell you, I forget what model my SCSI PCI card was but it was not easy getting it running. I had to find drivers that weren't technically supposed to be used with it to force it to work. :P
The driver I'm using shows up as an Adaptic AIC-7850 I forget what the exact model it actually is. It is an Adaptic branded card though.
I imagine a USB SCSI adapter would be nice to have if one has an iMac G3 though. Really miss having SCSI on that one.
Also another thing that would have been cool to have (that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist currently) is a portable "NetBoot" device you just plug into a router/your iMac G3 and once setup with a drive image you can boot a iMac G3 from it (or just about any Mac that supports NetBoot). It would be super niche though. NetBoot as far as I know only exists as a part of Mac OS X and you have to machine running Mac OS X with Netboot setup connnected to the network to have another Mac boot from.
I think I know what the naming issue is. The scsi adapter failed to install a driver halfway through and left it's ID behind populating it's future device id, which was later claimed by the flash drive. It's probably purely a UI disk caching bug. Well, and the fact there is no officially supported android driver for the scsi adapter.
Which implies that both 'daisy chaining' and 'IDs other than 1' are possibly still working without reflashing anything.
I remember seeing This type of USB to SCSI product in the late 90s to mid 2000s. SCSI got phased out on consumer devices as Firewire and USB 2.0 became more prominent.
Adaptec had a PCMCIA SCSI card and a similar USB to SCSI adapter.
Never had problems once I understood scsi back in the 90s. I have a USB to scsi, it works well with Windows 2000, including in a VM.
The one I have is an Adaptec USB 2 one. These are a real headache as they need the firmware pushed in to then via the driver. They don't just appear as a USB drive but are more flexible with drive ID and so on. I believe the work with XP with limitations but WIN 2000 is the highest version that can make the USB2 Adaptec USB2SCSI device work.
I have one of those. I’ll have to try.
I would LOVE to have something like this! I have an old Jaz drive sitting in my basement with backup files on it that I would love to get transferred over to modern media.
Would probably work fine under Linux, I had great results recovering partially dead hard disks using ddrescue which uses different techniques to try and recover marginal clusters.
Considering one of the first links he found specifically mentioned patching the kernel source to recognise these types of adapters - it seems like a safe bet.
I'll never understand why folks use Windows for this kind of stuff.
I wonder why Adrian is so stuck with windows, Linux is so much better for tinkerers and retro stuff. For example you have all the old partition schemes standard in kernel etc...
@@retrolabo because loonux is so user un-friendly. newsflash people just want to turn on their computer and have it just work.
@@ps5hasnogames55 but the point of this channel is mainly about old computers that just don't work and we tinker with them :)