BlueSCSI is AMAZING!

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Today we're checking out the BlueSCSI, a fantastic open source and open hardware SCSI replacement device. Have a failing old Mac hard drive? This one's for you!
BLUESCSI LINKS:
🍎 BlueSCSI Main Site: scsi.blue/
🍎 BlueSCSI Github: github.com/erichelgeson/BlueSCSI
A FEW GREAT BLUESCSI VIDEOS:
🍎 Joe's Computer Museum build: • A New Challenger - Blu...
🍎 Joe's Computer Museum benchmarks: • BlueSCSI Benchmarks an...
🍎 Retro Theory: • Apple Macintosh 68K O...
🍎 Ron's Computer Videos: • Using BlueSCSI (Extern...
🍎 Branchus Creations Builds an External: • Building and setting u...
🍎 CTR: • The BlueSCSI: A Cheape...
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💾 For more vintage Apple stuff, please subscribe: kzbin.info?s...
💾 Support these retro computing shenanigans on Patreon! / actionretro
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Check out my Amazon page with links to my tools, adapters, soldering equipment, camera gear and more: www.amazon.com/shop/actionretro
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💬 Come talk about old computers on the BitBang Social Mastodon! bitbang.social
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#BlueSCSI #Macintosh #ColorClassic

[@helfire23]

Thanks for the video Sean - though the performance you seen is not the norm (I get faster on my old SE) - This could be due to using the LIDO drivers which many blanks/premade images use. If you could retest with the Apple SCSI drivers you should get much better results - at or around 1mb/sec - also with the latest firmware as you mentioned you should get around 1.2mb/sec.

[@MrPGT]

Personally, I would suspect that SD card extension was being plagued by interference issues and slowing down data transfers.

[@mojoblues66]

From what can bee seen on the video, Sean only tested the sequential reads, not random reads, where any solid state based disk should be faster than a HDD.

[@JDW-]

@Eric Helgeson Just to confirm, the Apple SCSI drivers (any version?) are the fastest driver's (compared to FWB HD Toolkit, Silverlining, etc.) for any version of BlueSCSI? And on top of that, we ought to be using ExFAT too, for best performance, right?

[@hateWinVista]

@@mojoblues66 Random r/w performance(and latency) with solid state storage will wipe the floor for sure.

[@matthewmcphail7703]

@@JDW- I’ve done extensive testing of modern scsi sdcard solution on Mac, I can confirm that you really want to use the the apple drivers, FWB, lido and a few others I tested really poorly effected the read/write speeds

[@caseycu]

Symphony of Sound ❤️ I used to think the hard drive sound was done on purpose to let me know when the computer was “thinking” 😂

[@dotmatrixmoe]

Can't lie, I love it when my computer "thinks" in a quiet room.

[@SnipE_mS]

There were some drives I loved to sound of like the old seagate ST-225 and western digital caviar drives but some of the drives in the late 90s could be obnoxiously loud.

[@TheOldNet]

Been a fan BlueSCSI and now I am part of the team! If you're looking for BlueSCSI in Canada I am the official supplier and I just replenished my stock! Bluepills were hard to come by for a while there. So I'm happy that's seemed to have bounced back to normal. Great video again Sean!

[@SatanicMac]

Hey, Me too!

[@IoIxD]

Remember also that there are different classes of SD cards that perform faster or slower. I would double check the cards you used to see if they are slower.

[@BilisNegra]

Well, yes, that counts, but I doubt it would change matters dramatically.

[@zebular]

Assembled 2 of them, 1 for my SE/30 and 1 for my Color Classic. I install everything I want via emulator on my PC and create a backup image on the same SD card. It's AWESOME in that respect.

[@jeffreyplum5259]

You may want to use A1 or A2 marked SD cards. They are made for OS use. Older cards are focused on video or photo applications. Thanks

[@eDoc2020]

I haven't heard of these Application Classes before but have known that typical SD cards are _terrible_ for random accesses. Whenever I need to get new cards I'll need to look for these newer classification markings.

[@jeffreyplum5259]

@@eDoc2020 I think that the Raspberry Pi and similar systems gave them reasons to make OS focused cards. Good Luck

[@joelavcoco]

Hmm. In addition to the drivers within MacOS, I wonder what would happen with different SD cards. One way to get a better sense of the difference that might make between BlueSCSI and SCSI2SD would be to use the same micro-SD card in BlueSCSI, and (with an adapter) in SCSI2SD. It would be a bit time consuming, since it would need to be reconfigured for SCSI2SD, but might be instructive.

[@ActionRetro]

Ah yeah, I did use the same SD card for both

[@OtterlyInsane]

Did you try it without the SD Card extension cable? That could be having an effect

[@dh2032]

@@OtterlyInsane it probly check sum, reparation of the same data not making the first time

[@lexluthermiester]

@@ActionRetro You may wish to retest with a faster/higher quality SD card. UHS1 minimum, but I would advise UHS 2 for best results. They're more expensive, but worth the extra cost.

[@drywinddotnet]

Great vid! FYI - I've found even some modern higher class SD cards have a problem with exFAT on BlueSCSI, resulting in the BlueSCSI corrupting the card. I've found the FAT32 format on the SD card to be completely stable, although theoretically slower. On my 68K Macs there is no difference between FAT32 and exFAT, but newer faster machines may be different.

[@eDoc2020]

I can't imagine why exFAT would be faster, but I also haven't looked at the code. My assumption is that the BlueSCSI wouldn't modify the filesystem itself, so the only speed difference would be in calculating sector offsets. As the basic technology is the same with the two filesystems I can't imagine there being much of a difference here, and I would actually expect FAT32 to be imperceptibly faster due to only using 32-bit values.

[@edenrose2374]

​@@eDoc2020 its more likely due to the filetable size, it can increase write/read speeds tremendously. Sustained writes/reads on SD media is the medias strongest shortcoming, the more fragmented file table of FAT32 and the way the virtual-disks are stored for BlueSCSI is probably what is the biggest cause of both the corruption and performance differences. If i hazard a guess, it would be due to the SD media not having a cache, so when the buffer is written on the host side, the SDcard simply falls behind on write-chunks, which due to the limited signaling of the media the interface controller (Arduino) is not catching, and assuming its flushed out before it is. This is actually a common issue with alot of SDcard controllers, as the media lacks alot of the command queueing that ATA supporting disks have, and the bus the adapter is connected to expects. To be fair, the arduino is also extremely underpowered for alot of applications like this. As flash media, unlike spinning disks usually isnt stuck waiting for head movements, and can flush the bits directly to the media. As a result, its constantly telling adapter "its ok to send data", and the adapter translates this to the ATA side as "Go ahead, send the data from ram". The issue is, unlike say a modern SSD with dram for cache between the interfaces, you get stuck with the flash media becoming overloaded without warning. The signaling is simply too fast for the arduino to scream "STOP!" to the ata bus, and without a cache to dump the data coming it, it simply gets lost or overwrites the already waiting data. This is why performance is so spotty, and unless your using a top-tier SDcard, your performance will be extremely variable. With small, random w/r performing extremely well, but everything else performing terribly.

[@ThomasFlemingOriginal]

If using that extender cable, open the housing and remove the surface mount resistor. I had all sorts of R/W issues with one until I did that.

[@meebis7]

I’m highly suspicious of that SD extension cable. I suspect that it’s not shielded well, and the length may be affecting performance. Also, as others have mentioned, the SD card may not be a high enough speed one.

[@NozomuYume]

Yeah, and it's passing right under a flyback transformer.

[@OverDriveOnline7921]

There is the possibility that the cable extension causes issue as it will effectively act as an antenna. Remember that CRT systems generate a lot of noise and while there is shielding, the extension could be causing the SCSI bus to drop to slower speeds such as SCSI 1 Before assuming this is correct, you really need to test without the cable in place to eliminate that as a potential issue

[@pkf4124]

The Amiga users have been using these extenders for ages with out issue. That said they dont have a hoofing great pulsing HV source pushing out RF and magnetic noise just above them.

[@wolarts]

also when he picked it up at 13:14 the menu bar glitched out a bit. definitely something off with it.

[@shmehfleh3115]

@@wolarts I think he just hit a key on they keyboard. The menu bar blinks like that when you do something to piss System 7 off and the volume is muted.

[@GaiusIuliusCaesar1]

Made a mount for SD extension in Nubus slots for any mac with the same case as the quadra 650. Just published it on prusa printers

[@ActionRetro]

Oh neat!!

[@ActionRetro]

Just found it!

[@ACRPC-dot-NET]

Good timing, just finished building one of my BlueSCSI kits.

[@grantfielder]

Dude awesome work! Also that Mac emulator on newer systems helped me solve an issue with a client. He had old animations that he made as a kid, and now can see them on his new system in all their glory. 👍🤘

[@TheBasementChannel]

Great video Sean! These devices are such a boon to us retro collectors.

[@richfiles]

You know what would be an INCREDIBLE mod, though i'm uncertain what lies behind, or if there's even clearance for it... Imagine removing the Color Classic name badge (which is a small plastic piece), and mounting it to a small hinge. Hide the SD card extender's slot behind that bade, and then be able to cover the slot with the name badge.

[@steveg5122]

Literally bought this for my mac classic a week ago. Sadly the FDD is dying and it definitely needs recapping.

[@TechMadeEasyUK]

This seems really interesting, I'll be looking into one of these for my SCSI-equipped Pentium Pro system to replace an old and loud 2GB IBM disk

[@ericwood3709]

Glad this exists. I've tried some cheap microSD-IDE devices, but they have had issues.

[@RetroBytesUK]

I'm very late to this video, I'm thinking of getting a bluescsi for one of my Sun workstations. Thought someone has proabably done a video on it, and your video popped up in the list, prooving I'd missed this one the first time round.

[@peporgan]

Hi, great video. Is there any use/advantage for using BlueSCSI in a newer PPC Mac, such as the B&W G3 or G4 Tower with a SCSI PCI card?

[@andrewmackie5110]

I have a BlueSCSI for my Plus and can confirm that it in fact rocks.

[@cheater00]

Hi Sean, I've recently randomly been recommended this video on a KZbin account I never use. I watched it, it was fun and well presented. Then I checked out your channel and watched the "Cursed Mac" series... That was loads of fun! Finally I watched your videos about the Color Classic. I've had a lot of fun. Thanks a lot for the videos! I would appreciate it if you could show some software on the classic macs. For example, how to use an emulator like Basilisk or SheepShaver, how to mount cds to it, how to make your own HyperCards, how to use Kaleidoscope... Hardware is cool, but being able to jump in and have fun with an emulator is super valuable. I really appreciate your good natured character in the videos. Also your light hearted approach to this stuff is cool - even if you don't always do everything super perfectly, it doesn't matter so much, since it's no big deal. Especially the cringy melted plastic on the Cursed Mac applies here... it was still fun to watch and I didn't mind. After all... it was already very ugly, haha. Looking forward to more videos from you! I'll be watching the back-catalogue.

[@davidbowne122]

Had a 65mb scsi Segate drive but it was on our PC. Was quite the upgrade for our family's IBM PC in 1990. But yes it made lots of noises. Less noisy than a 5.25 disk drive.

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

🎵I'm blue da ba dee be da🎵

[@adrianptorres]

The scsi-2 controller is the same between the lc 575 and 6100. But the bus speed is different 16mhz vs 30mhz on the board. I have used the same hd from the 6100 a quantum fireball and it did run more slowly that in the 6100. Eventually I put a 9 gig ultra scsi cheetah drive and it was a lot faster. Lastly did you check your disk cache settings? If they are low and you do not have l2 cache then that also impedes the bench mark. Make sure that virtual memory is off and set disk cache settings to 4096k for best hd performance.

[@ryan-zv6xp]

Man, these things are sweet. I should make some for my macs. Very nice video! 👌👌👌

[@AndyGarcia-bu7le]

I am hating the PowerPC sticker on the Color Classic. Makes it look tacky man.

[@ActionRetro]

I'm starting to agree - I have a lead on a much smaller factory-looking one for after I retrobrite it.

[@Underestimated37]

You need a small badge down by the QuickTime logo (I had one to show but link posting is disabled)

[@eDoc2020]

It shouldn't look Takky, it's Mystic :)

[@DavidStahlOLDHAPPyMACs]

Yes Sean Great solution I can do things on my Mac plus with Ease

[@oldestgamer]

I'm wondering if I can use this to replace the SCSI drive in my Atari Mega STe and TT. What do you think?

[@MxArgent]

Been trialling BlueSCSI (via the AzulSCSI design) on my IIsi and it's worked out pretty well so far. Be careful not to mess with the DIPs, though

[@stevenclark2188]

STM32s can be really overpowered. In a school project we got one to do many-note polyphonic FM synthesis with no buffering and without even breaking out the assembly.

[@pseydtonne]

You've showed some awesome stuff in this episode, especially the Basilisk II emulator. Thank you so much! I noticed that you've set the Mystic's drive cache down to 96 kB. Since you have 36 MB RAM on there, wouldn't it help to move that up to 1024 kB? Perhaps your BlueSCSI's performance numbers would improve.

[@petevenuti7355]

Does anyone know of any SCSI devices that implemented target mode over multiple LUN's?

[@encorespod2135]

I've not looked at what this is using, but last time I had to do anything SD with an STM32 I found that all the pre-existing libraries out there seem to use a buffer. I.e., reading in blocks from the (image in this case) file. This never bothered me because I was using it for audio, so my reads where always sequential. However if you are doing random reads and the block size you are reading is smaller than the buffer... well then the code loads multiple blocks from the 'disk' (image file) then has to throw them all away and once again read more blocks than it needs... and throw them away again...

[@UmbertoAmante]

I would like to try BS (Blue SCSI) on an IBM p630 Power4 system which is SCSI. Any thoughts on this?

[@SudosFTW]

check to make sure the extension cable isn't adding any latency or slowdown. common sense says that adapter shouldn't exist and may be slightly detrimental to your benchmarks.

[@djayhawk1]

Have you had a problem with the SD Extension cable? Every time I take the SD card out of the Ext cable I have to reinsert it into BLUE SCSI directly to get it to work again. Any ideas?

[@thedude_-__-_7528]

Is there a way to use the bluescsi with files other than disk image files? I'm trying to find a better way to transfer files to my Mac LC than floppy discs and burning cds. I thought it would be nice to load up files on the sd card and stick it in the blue scsi and transfer them to the 575. A lot of the files aren't disk images though.

[@stanhry]

I recycled most of my scsi drives . Had no working computers with scsi anymore. They were just sitting on a shelf in the basement with the crt monitors. I am keeping my first PowerBook g3 pismo for now. It can play most of my retro software.

[@BrandonNedwek]

I know this is a Mac focused video but one useful feature of the scsi2sd that doesn't seem to be implemented on the BlueSCSI is being able to define the geometry of the virtual drives. Not an issue on Mac but I play with old Sun machines too and in old OS versions the format utilities have limits on the number of cylinders/tracks so you have to fiddle around with the config file to get a "drive" with the right geometry. I think this might be an issue on other old Unixes as well (NextSTEP, irix?). But as a plug and play solution this does look nicer than dd'ing files to an sd card for scsi2sd.

[@helfire23]

True! Most of the contributors are mac people, but we've gotten a few workstation contributions lately as well. I do know @Drake has an image working on his NeXT. Firmware will continue to evolve as more people learn about it and contribute!

[@BrandonNedwek]

@@helfire23 Thanks for the reply! Glad to hear others are working on new features, sounds like a really great project. Will definitely keep watching.

[@m_e_h6874]

Does BlueSCSI also work with Imac G3s?

[@davidew98]

before using the external sd adapter you need to find out what class sd cards the blue scsi is compatible with. that adapter does not appear to be compatible with newer sd cards

[@alerey4363]

Very nice comparison of the 2 current scsi-2-microSD cards available for cheap and DIY hackers!

[@roystonlodge]

That's too bad about the speed hit. I was thinking of getting one for playing around with Avid Cinema video editing on my old PowerMac 6500, but Avid Cinema needs really fast IO or else it drops lots of frames.

[@baconfister]

My father has an Imagewriter II, Laserwriter NTX, and an HP 4mx that still work. Why don’t companies make stuff that lasts anymore??? I have replaced six laser printers in the past 12 years. It’s an organized racket, methinks.

[@brendanhoffmann8402]

Blue SCSI sounds amazing... Unlike the job I did on my 2015 MacBook Pro... I swapped the battery out and was stupid enough to buy an non genuine battery! Now it's running at a crawl! Such a pain, have to do it all over again!

[@NovaSilisko]

Is it basically bit-banging the SCSI signals? That's my first thought when it comes to the speed. Honestly, if that is the case, I'm impressed it can even reach the levels it does.

[@helfire23]

There is something wrong with the test - he should be getting ~1mb/sec. And up to 1.2mb/sec on the latest firmware.

[@another3997]

The most likely problem is the long cable of the SD card reader. It's running right next to the back of the CRT, PSU and all the other electrical components. I doubt the cable is shielded well enough to cope, and I'm betting the card reader isn't the highest quality. Sometimes you need to discount the obvious culprits first.

[@8a41jt]

In reference to my post of about 6 hours ago, I've got an entire collection of digital hardware, most of it no newer than 10 years old that I'll offer to anyone for the cost of shipping (from New England) & packaging, and maybe toss in $5 or less for my effort to get this to you ... far too much to inventory here; but most of it still would still run ... I've not cannibalized very much, but most of it is still useable. In particular, I've got maybe 20 SCSI 2.x drives (huge energy consumers -- 5 of them would make a pizza oven), a couple of Adaptec SCSI controllers, perhaps 4 or 5 x86 (mixed Intel and AMD) systems in (most of) their original floortop/deskside cases -- the one thing I do *NOT* have is working monitors of any kind (but I have at least one relatively modern 42" TV, maybe; and a couple of desktop 22-24" monitors very good for parts). Leave me a message here if you're interested, I need to clear out this office sooner or later -- the "junk" pile is getting larger by the year. I would not call *any* of this stuff energy efficient, nor will I warrant any of this h/w. Thanks.

[@zerocks88]

AR is soooooooooo under-rated, how only 35k subs ?!

[@alextirrellRI]

Hey Sean -- hate to have to tell you at this point, but I've had negative performance experience with those SD card extensions. I had tried one with an SD2IDE -- it really slowed things down. It's been a few years since I did the testing and benchmarking, but I would be definitely weary of it providing the best results -- this may explain why your BlueSCSI benchmarks came back so low.

[@orange_light_pictures]

I have no idea how these work but I assume that the Blue SCSi, virtually mounts the .img or .hda files in onboard ram. So i'm assuming it uses a processor to do the unpacking. There could be a bottleneck on the Blue SCSi depending on SD card size, or block size and the way it manages ram! Or cache storage, for the Mac to access.

[@anaraluca1181]

What about faste sd?

[@StevenJPiper]

This is so weird, I have been watching videos of BlueSCSI stuff yesterday and today for my LC/Performa 475,.so this is useful. I may go with this for cheapness, but I still hear the RaSCSI calling my name. I worked on my 475 for MARCHintosh this year, but on my video I used an old server drive. It's loud... 😬

[@thargok]

Does BlueSCSI have a way to unmount/mount images on a specific SCSI ID like we see with floppy disc emulators? Right now it seems like RaSCSI is the only workable solution on my SCSI macs to swap images on a booted machine - but I was hoping BlueSCSI might have an optical disc setting that rotates images once an image is unmounted and the "disc" is "ejected."

[@mikewottle8893]

No, it has no way to switch things on the fly. I think the new beta firmware is going to offer image sets, which can be rotated by changing a jumper. But no rotating through CD images, AFAIK.

[@MrAlan1828]

SIde note, I've been using Floppy EMU for he past week and its simular to the Blue SCSI. Floppy EMU can do 20mb images and load Prodos, Lisa, Apple and Mac floppies 400mb 800kb images mostly external but having it internal is convienent

[@ryanwakebradtelle8682]

Have you seen anyone put a commodore 64 in a commodore 64. Excluding the commodore 128 I mean, I'm talking about an adding card so small but includes all hardware already inside.

[@martinnyberg71]

4:19 So is the Blue SCSI limited to 7 mounted disk images at a time, or can it pretend to be several different SCSI buses at once? 🤔

[@Aapj3h]

Are you also gonna review the RaSCSI?

[@leonkiriliuk]

FWIW I got a SCSI2SD in my SE/30 with a custom 3D printed holder that is readily available. The SD card is easily accessible from the back of the computer. Even with your old setup, you can use SD extenders to get the SD slot out of the computer. So ability to swap SD cards is not a pro for either solutions.

[@UpLateGeek]

Very cool! I'm guessing the bottleneck is the lack of a hardware SDIO interface. It would have to be emulated in software, which is probably slowing things down considerably.

[@cerberusstokes6244]

How can I make a MACINTOSH PERFORMA 6200CD computer faster

[@slashtiger1]

@12:12 or you could've just used the case that came with the BlueSCSI for this setup... That would've allowed you to use the other case for a more practical scenario...

[@wskinnyodden]

This indicates that the BlueSCSI needs some deep firmware revisions and improvements, assuming the CPU has the needed BUS performance and that the issue is improper code (which soulds like it is) the BlueSCSI shall perform better than any other solution.

[@another3997]

That's a very bold statement considering what the creator of the device has suggested (use Apple drivers), not to mention several comments about the extended SD card reader as the likely culprit. I would recommend holding back on your judgment until some of those ideas have been eliminated as the cause.

[@wskinnyodden]

@@another3997 I'm pointing to the firmware on the bluepill itself needing deep optimization, and it would likely enjoy to have fast SD cards and some RAM for caching.

[@wskinnyodden]

@@another3997 Yeah, I'll stick to my point based on a simple proven premisse, SD cards can and do perform way faster than the results being obtained. Caching will help here considerably, but that is not the whole story, even without caching SD cards perform faster than what is being achieved at this time.

[@wskinnyodden]

Block size mismatch is a huge problem performance wise on any filesystem, so you should make sure these do match. Furthermore, small block sizes will improve performance for small files but hinder large file performance, and the oposite is true too, large block sizes will improve performance for large files and degrade performance on small files. Now, discrepancy between the underlying filesystem block size and the "real" block size perceived/used by the OS that will be using that storage will have a considerable impact on performance and should be prevented at ALL and ANY costs! This may force you to use smaller SD cards as larger SD cards will typically have larger block sizes. So, keep in mind that unless you use EXFAT instead of FAT32 (which the BlueSCSI would have to support natively) your block sizes will be quite large. For example, a 32Gb FAT32 formated SD card will likely have at least a 32Kb block size, an EXFAT one will enable you to bring that down to 4Kb, this though does require (as mentioned) the BlueSCSI firwmare to support this Filesystem version.

[@eDoc2020]

Due to the way (statically allocated) disk images work you would _always_ want the filesystem cluster size on the host card to be as large as possible. I spent a while thinking of how to explain it before I realized it's simple: disk images are very large files.

[@wskinnyodden]

@@eDoc2020 yes they are, but the host side controller still needs to do 4kb or smaller requests, unless you have some smart caching and the needed RAM for this approach, smaller micro-controller based approaches will need to use algorithms that will be directly impacted by the sector sizes (and their alignment). This is where crap it's the fan.

[@eDoc2020]

​ @João Henrique Da Silva Nunes Jales Ribeiro The purpose of the filesystem is so the MCU can determine which physical sector number on the card contains a given sector number of the image. With fewer blocks this process should be faster because it doesn't need to process as much FS metadata. Once this mapping is determined for a given sector the FS block sizes don't matter at all. If the Mac requests a single 512b sector and the SD card is using 64k clusters the MCU will only request the needed 512b from the card. IMO the only place performance would suffer is if there is gross misalignment where each cluster on the filesystem of the emulated drive is spread over multiple blocks of the host device. If the host blocks are larger the chances of needing multiple host blocks per request are lower.

[@explosivelybrilliant]

I wouldn't be surprised if that SD adapter / extension cable is causing some interference that may be slowing your performance down

[@DAVIDGREGORYKERR]

What a SCSILVD to SATA adapter might let you use SSD drives.

[@RetroAnachronist]

I'd love to see you get A/UX working on the BlueSCSi. It doesn't seem possible, but if it is, I bet it'd be even easier than SCSI2SD.

[@helfire23]

It is indeed possible! There's even premade images in the repo.

[@mikewottle8893]

I have A/UX running on a BlueSCSI in my SE/30. Very easy. I believe I installed it in Basilisk II on my Mac and copied the disk image over to the SD card.

[@ChrisDreher]

Awesome video. My only disappointment was finding out that BlueSCSI was not Bluetooth based, which sounded horrifying to me even considering that I used to chair the Bluetooth HID Working Group. 😉

[@kirishima638]

Why would even expect that? Just because it had blue in the name? That makes no sense.

[@ChrisDreher]

@@kirishima638 Actually, at least back when Bluetooth was new-ish, everything was blue. Everything. Blue was in the names of Bluetooth products. Blue was the color of the plastics. Blue LEDs were constantly used even though they were more expensive that other LED colors at the time. Blue was in the name of the SDKs, the protocol stacks, protocol analyzers, the company names, etc, etc. It was so intense that non-blue products stood out. One such exception was the CATC Merlin Bluetooth protocol analyzer that was purple and that was only because CATC had already used blue as the color of the CATC Chief protocol analyzer for USB. It's not as bad these days, though.

[@kirishima638]

@@ChrisDreher That was 20 years ago dude.

[@ChrisDreher]

@@kirishima638 Yes, many are old, some are new.

[@dataterminal]

I actually miss the sound of a hard disk, clicking away as it seeks for it's data. I wouldn't be mad if there was a speaker addon to emulate seek sounds. Not so much the heavy hum of the drive motor spinning though.

[@helfire23]

Someone has made a little noise maker to hook up to the activity LED :)

[@wskinnyodden]

Oh by the way, have you made absolutely SURE that the FAT32 block size is 4Kb? Otherwise you will have severe performance degradation due to block sizes mismatch.

[@eDoc2020]

If the BlueSCSI works the way I think it does then you would want to use as large of a block size as possible on the host card.

[@MikeSteidl]

Sean, you are using a class 4 SD Card! That's terrifyingly slow!!! 😁 Use at least class 10 for much higher speed. There are even faster ones for app usage. You get what you pay! 😅Also the SD extension might make problems in that szenario, but I am not sure.

[@amnottabs]

iirc class 4 SDs are in the 4MB/s category (hence the 4), he got less than 1MB/s

[@eDoc2020]

@@amnottabs 4 is less than 1 so that's not relevant here. The old speed classes are completely meaningless here, the only ones that are worth caring about here are the newer A1 and A2 application speed classes.

[@amnottabs]

@@eDoc2020 my point was that the SD card wasn't the culprit of the slow speeds, read the pinned comment you would see the maker/developers themselves claims the speed had to be 1.2MB/s which should be achievable by a class 4 SD

[@kadevaccari9667]

You know what! you should make a web site designed to view your videos on ppc macs.

[@dermond]

"Remember Hard drives?" Me, who just bought one for my pc- ...

[@motheroats]

I hope all the Macintosh community creates a real museum that has the coolest design and has classes to teach soldiering and has research labs

[@singletona082]

Having a shared folder/partition that modern OS's can access seamlessly that can also be seen by the retro thing you're going to plug the card into is a rather major plus. Makes data transportation a heck of a lot simpler. Alternitively if you have one of those serial to wifi things you could have an FTP server running to have as a shared fial dump i guess. Though I suppose you're like... WAY more knowledgeable on me so it's like a third grader trying to offer advice to stephen hawking.

[@kungfujesus06]

It's not super surprising to me that the bluescsi is slower. It has to emulate those blocks with bytes on exfat. With scsi2sd it's just presenting raw blocks

[@eDoc2020]

It's still just presenting raw blocks, just with a translation in between. Depending on the code optimizations and FAT caching used it shouldn't be much slower, especially for sequential accesses.

[@projectcafe_]

Hoho, spinning metal? Maybe you could even say, spinning rust?

[@philipl8184]

You can overclock the blueSCSI for more speed

[@jlj945]

I’m not sure what SD card you’re using but make sure it is a good one. I hate SD cards they’re extremely unreliable and slow unless you spend a lot on them. Even if you think it’s over kill I’d be using the highest class most expensive one you could find for this; in whatever size you wanted.

[@wyldride]

I thought I took the red pill, but it turned out to be a Hot Tamales candy. Mmm -- Cinnamon-y!

[@fffUUUUUU]

Harry Potter got jacked for the summer season ladies

[@8a41jt]

Wow. I'm a digital pack rat, been building since 1983 or so, still have a bunch of hardware that you could get retail today for about a nickel (US), but it was extremely expensive back in the day. Adaptec 29xx SCSI controllers were great compared to IDE stuff ... you could put just about any device under the sun (still have a Sony SCSI cassette -- standard 1 7/8 IPS format) on that bus and it would just work. But that's about as nostalgic as I'm going to get, I came to detest that awful "terminal" font as a reminder of the bad old days; today's ware is still a vast improvement over what we had to work with 40+ years ago. Yep, still detest M$FT, I'll never lose that bias ... ever.

[@petevenuti7355]

Remember DPT?

[@8a41jt]

@@petevenuti7355 No, I do not. Enlighten me, perhaps? Thanks.

[@petevenuti7355]

@@8a41jt Distributed Processing Technology 77-99' bought out by Adaptec. My last SCSI card was an ISA caching raid controller. There were something like 40 jumpers I had to set for Io, dma, busmastering, shadow ram address, even the cards own SCSI I'd and lun was configurable.. there were no aspi drivers, Linux had cam drivers but I never was able to get them working. Card was LONG, full length, and I ran it with 5 full hight 2gig micropolis drives for 2 decades. When I turned on my computer my desk shook! It was like driving a hum-v in the office. I had dreams of using those cards in target mode to bridge the busses of many motherboards to create some real Distributed Processing Technology.... (Because the buss speed was so much faster then Ethernet and token ring back then) But technology sped up faster than I could learn how...

[@8a41jt]

@@petevenuti7355 Thank you for the well thought-out and complete answer! (I love to collect trivia, even if it doesn't directly affect anything I'm doing now), had never heard of DPT before. I found one of the two SCSI 2 adapters I recalled using very well, an Adaptec 2940UW (32-bit, 40 MB throughput) based on a AIC7880P, no h/w jumpers on the full-size board. I downloaded the last Linux driver source code for kernel 2.6, aic79xxx.h comments refer to 16 max targets, 256 LUNs supported. Looks like the driver software is from 2006, the hardware EPROM says 1996. If you want it for the cost of shipping/pkg, let me know, I'll ship.

[@petevenuti7355]

@@8a41jt thank you! Much appreciated, but no. I think I still have one or 2 of those around, 68pin cables and active terminators.. most of the hard drives I had that were fast enough to be worth putting on that bus burned out... I might even have a few LSI SCSI cards too... When my ex kicked me out and I shut down the ISP I was trying to run(unrelated) I packed my trailer with 750lb of old computers to take to the scrap metal place.. I still got too much stuff ... I'm not building custom computers for people anymore either. If I had the money, I'd get a computer with something more advanced than a PCI bus, and 750mhz CPU... I'd go with a SAS controller now, works with both SCSI and sata😁. I'll make a similar offer to you though, do you need any external SCSI cables? Anything you need or want from from a few decades ago? Most of what I have I'd be happy to part with for only the cost of shipping. I think that's better than the scrap yard.

[@acumenium8157]

You used a full-size SD card instead of MicroSD, and it was only 16GB. Something tells me it was a really slow and old card. MicroSD would probably be faster, and newer. I am also willing to bet the extender had something to do with a loss in speed, it usually does for like the optical disc-drive emulators for consoles.

[@another3997]

Whilst I agree with your card reader diagnosis, and we don't know what card Sean used, I will point out that brand new, very fast, full size SD cards are still available.

[@andresbravo2003]

Heh, Symphonies.

[@draggonhedd]

Would be really fun in the color classic to replace the floppy drive with a zip or 3.5" MO drive. The slot is already big enough. For the SD card you should make a pop-in insert for that rectangle on the back panel that holds the card reader. Definitely think thats a good idea!

[@RonsCompVids]

If you were using any of the LIDO images, you’re going to see results like this. This video should be pulled until it can be verified what the real benchmark results are.

[@GarthBeagle]

Is there a performance issue with the LIDO driver vs ? Or some other issue?

[@helfire23]

@@GarthBeagle Yes, LIDO drivers are extremely slow (was used in a lot of things before we realized it) - Apple drivers give much better performance. I'm combing through our images now to ensure there's none left with LIDO.

[@RonsCompVids]

It’s appreciably slower to use LIDO as your driver than the official Apple one (as appropriate for your version of MacOS). Those LIDO image files are still floating around out there, and are one of the biggest reasons why folks see less than ideal speed from their BlueSCSI.

[@GarthBeagle]

@@helfire23 Oh wow - I never use LIDO (unless I have to on some weird setup)

[@GarthBeagle]

@@RonsCompVids Yuk, we should evangelize this more, make it clear to be sure to format the image using an Apple tool that installs an Apple driver. I'm wondering if any other drivers (FWB HD Toolkit, etc) have performance issues relative to Apple's.

[@SaulVector]

Made a video upgrade a 5500/225 man

[@Promilus1984]

It seems there's insufficient RAM to handle buffering (well iirc it's only 20K on bluepill), MCU with big RAM (or external RAM interface) might've been better choice to build such device.

[@another3997]

So many people ready to blame the new SCSI hardware, without any thought as to what else could cause the problem. If you read some of the other comments, especially the one from the creator of the device, you'll realise that the problem isn't with the device itself. Drivers and that overly long, cheap, poorly shielded cable for the SD card reader are the likely culprits. Not to mention we have no idea what class of SD card Sean used.

[@Promilus1984]

@@another3997 Oh, I guess you did give it a thought yourself... while speed overall might be influenced by bad cable sudden drop of of speed when sample size reaches 32K is consistent with something you might expect from (over)saturated buffer. If you have any counterarguments I'd welcome them but atm all you do is just baseless accusations.

[@lumibraulius]

I'm not a big fan of APPLE especially in its current state, but I love your videos. I love that you are not a "retro-purist" and take all these platforms to the limit ..... I can tell that you love what you do and that's what lately is not abundant on the internet in general. Greetings from Spain my friend! Keep it up!

the good scusi.....

[@godslayer1415]

give me your lunch money.

[@joeysluzer1913]

Blue SCSI works, but it's not as good as SCSI2SD.

[@bl0chi]

>>>>Please: compare BlueSCSI vs RaSCSI

[@edenrose2374]

@Action Retro - The bottleneck is not the system, but SDcards. SDcards provide the worst throughput of any flash media. its difficult to find reliable and fast SDcards on the market that are not prohibitively expensive. The flash media types in SDcards are similiar to low-quality SSD's sold for SATA and NVME, out of china. However, this is due to SDcards size. After watching your video, it instantly comes to mind the 2 major bottlenecks in your setup. 1. Your extension on your SD card slot to the external SD-card slot adds alot of Latency. Electrical signals are sensitive to cable length and degridation occurs the farther out you travel from the source of the signal generated. Your adapter is not providing power, so its relying on the SDcard slot on the BlueSCSI to do all the powering of the signals needed to read the SDcard. Adding latency and introducing signal degridation. - this doesnt happen on the SCSI side obviously because the device is transmitting using the power supplied by the cable. but the SDcard slot doesnt have that as its not intended to be extended. 2. Major performance bottleneck of SDcards is during sustained writes and reads. Both SCSI to SD adapters you use, lack any form of cache. This makes them effectively half of the performance of a comparable SSD on the same bus. That is the major benifit of a SSD is dram cache (and larger flash chips due to the extra space) on the device that gives a read and write buffer to smooth out performance. Fixing both of these would drastically improve performance on your machine, with your current setup. --- However, moving on, SCSI is not dead. The original interface was and is still used still heavily in industrial applications, as many legacy equipment are still in operation. x86 machines of the 90s used SCSI heavily and as a result hardware is still being produced today supporting it. That said, Getting away from conventional HDD's is a smart move after all. But wanting to get more performance from a device on the SCSI bus means not using Cheap flash media found in SDcards, but using more powerful flash chips found in SSD's. There is two ways to go about this. Option 1: is to get a industrial SSD with a built-in SCSI interface. They are (kinda) rare, but they do exist. However, most of them are marketed directly at the industries they are targeted at, so finding them on the second-hand consumer market (ebay) usually means they are nearing the end of their lives. So finding some one with access to industrial equipment distributors is usually the best way to get access to them. Option 2: SAS/SATA to SCSI interface adapter. SATA shares the same interface protocols as SCSI, however its termination without a port duplexer is where its similarities end. SATA is afterall a cut-down version of SCSI at its core, and as a result is very similar. The drawback however is using a simple SATA to SCSI interface adapter is, without some type of port duplexer, it terminates the entire SCSI bus and due to its electrical limitations doesnt allow any other devices on the bus. However smart SATA to SCSI adapters do exist and can easily overcome this issue by handling all the legwork of communicating with the SSD, freeing up the limitations of the connector. Keep in mind, however with both of these options there is different types of SCSI interfaces. SCA 50, 68 or 80 pin connectors were common for SCSI's lifespan. even modern SAS drives (Serial Attached SCSI), all share ancestory with SCSI and are generally compatible with the right adapter to interface with the device. The key here is all hard-disks support ATA communication. ATA is a standard of communicating with HDD's accross many types of interfaces. This is the reason why CF cards are pin-compatible and work out-of-the-box with IDE controllers. They are just IDE like interfaces, using ATA command structure. However, SDcards and many modern portable flash media doesnt have any advanced communication structure. They are just a raw flash media, with (Sometimes) a simple wear leveler to detect flash wear and predict failure. They are so simple, as they have to fit into a tiny space and the controller can not exceed 6 pins /max/. This means that most of the physical wiring lanes are taken up just by power and data connections. There is no way for extra datapins to even exist to gather significant data, even if there was a complex chip that could fit there to handle the ATA command structure. ---- So dont fret, there is options out there. Just remember, SDcards are great for moving files between devices, but are not reliable or fast for general use. They are cheap and thats what has made them quickly rise in popularity for removable media.

[@Ghozer]

Hard Drive's are often made of coated Glass or Ceramic ;) not really spinning metal, unless you count the thin layer on the surface...

[@jackpijjin4088]

Really old Hard Discs were metal at least, have scrapped a couple- first one was metal, second was glass!

[@SatanicMac]

Lido driver "SCSI Gate" 2022.

[@AnAltWindows7User]

Scsi spelled as cussy

[@bomberfish77]

6th

[@pizzacade8594]

Wow I'm early.