The RaSCSI is MAGIC for Old Macs (and Much More!)

Today we're checking out the RaSCSI, a device that connects to a Raspberry Pi, and lets it communicate directly with the SCSI bus on your vintage Mac (and other machines too!)
Using the RaSCSI software, you can emulate drives, networking adapters, and even cool stuff like video cards are possible (in the future). There's amazing functionality in the web interface, including absolute magic like download a file from the internet, and mount it inside an HFS cd rom image on the fly! Getting files from the web onto a vintage Mac was never easier.
We also have the BEAUTIFUL PotatoFi case, an Apple-esque Snow White design language case for the RaSCSI and Raspberry Pi together.
Let's put this stuff together, and see just what it can do!
I've got a TON of links for you today!
🍎 @Mac84 did a GREAT vid on the RaSCSI as well, including Ethernet emulation! • RaSCSI - The Ultimate ...
🍎 RaSCSI (Mac version) on Tindie: www.tindie.com/products/lando...
🍎 RaSCSI on Github: github.com/akuker/RASCSI
🍎 RaSCSI Wiki: github.com/akuker/RASCSI/wiki
🍎 PotatoFi RaSCSI slim case (for Pi Zero W): www.etsy.com/listing/10366442...
🍎 3D print your own PotatoFI RaSCSI case: www.prusaprinters.org/prints/...
🍎 VintageApple "Mac Drivers Museum": vintageapple.org/macdrivers/
🍎 Thread on Anandtech from 2000 (lol): forums.anandtech.com/threads/...
🍎 Article dispelling some SCSI myths: milosoftware.com/mike/scsi_ide...
🍎 Set up your Raspberry Pi headlessly: www.raspberrypi.org/documenta...
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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 Action Retro Discord! / discord
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#Macintosh #RaSCSI #raspberrypi

[@babyboomertwerkteam5662]

People call hard drives "spinning rust" because... that's exactly what they are. Iron oxide on a metal disc that spins round and round! I noticed Apple sure likes technologies that allow you to daisy-chain devices. SCSI, FireWire, Thunderbolt - all support daisy-chaining.

[@TheSulross]

PC clone makers went with tower cases and extra drive bays where could just buy naked harddisk and just connect it to the controller; Apple went with sleeker case designs but had to buy much more expensive external harddisk in their own enclosure and with own power supply, and then daisy chain them off the Mac. Really made me appreciate the superior pragmatism of the PC world

[@FloydBunsen]

As well as USB 4

[@lee4hmz]

The funny part there is that hard drives by and large *haven't* been oxide since the late 1980s. They've since all used plated or evaporated metal media (like high-end tape).

[@TheBasementChannel]

You forgot ADB

[@babyboomertwerkteam5662]

@@lee4hmz that's quite interesting!

[@LGR]

This looks _brilliant,_ I gotta grab one! Or two or three, I have so many Macs I haven't added a SCSI2SD to that could use this. Wonder how it'd work with PC SCSI controllers, hm. Shame that its coolest features aren't fully working yet. Hopefully they'll get that sorted soon.

[@ActionRetro]

They've made a ton of progress, even since this video was released! Check out @Mac84's video on it, he got the ethernet working - kzbin.info/www/bejne/hpLXZWWDg7ebnqM

[@raskolnikov9067]

Hi Clint!

[@20blog28]

Never expected Clint to comment on here

[@paddy1414]

Anyone else read this comment in this LGR's smooth voice

[@93LT1RamAir]

@@paddy1414 lol yes I did

[@MarcoGPUtuber]

I love it when new hardware is made for old products.

[@omar_ehab]

You live in Taiwan right

[@sarahts21]

One of the strong points of SCSI is that it didn't really care how big the drive was, maximum partition size was down to the OS.

[@dh2032]

I though the the main differences was way back the very first SCSI and IDE/and the standard before IDE, was that SCSI Drives where a lot more independent of the host MAC/PC, like error correction, status monitoring etc., than IDE and the communication was generally handled by a expansion card, take the load of the PC/MAC CPU, and what was called IDE, where a lot more dumber, than the more resent models, which now do almost all the house keep the first SCSI Drives did with interacting with the MAC/PC?

[@PotatoFi]

Fantastic video! Thanks a bunch for the review of my cases! A ton of people have ordered cases this morning - I love printing things and shipping them out to other Macintosh enthusiasts!

[@ActionRetro]

So awesome!!! Thanks for the amazing work on these - they're beautiful

[@ickipoo]

SCSI predates IDE/ATA by many years. PC's started with MFM drives. MFM was a much cruder and lower level protocol that left a lot of the control to the host - data was referenced by cylinder, head & sector, and the host had to be aware of the physical geometry of the drive. Get this wrong (eg, if your CMOS battery went flat) and you lose your data. SCSI was a high level protocol, with the drive appearing simply as an array of linear blocks. The protocol also allowed for devices other than storage - for example, it was common to attach high performance scanners and printers via SCSI. When IDE first appeared, it simply moved the HD controller from the motherboard to the drive - the IDE bus just buffered and extended the motherboard bus to the drive. It was only later that he protocol started to gain SCSI-like features, such as linear block addressing, and scatter gather, and became ATA. Even during this period, SCSI was a set ahead, using LVD (low-voltage differential) for better signal integrity for higher speeds and longer cables. I used SCSI on server-class machines, as well as my personal desktops, for many years, and I routinely had a large number of devices attached. I never had any problems with bus termination. The simple rule was that you need to terminate both ends of the bus to prevent reflections (because you're basically dealing with RF). In later years, active terminated appeared, which made it even easier.

[@ActionRetro]

Oh very interesting, thank you for this!

[@hfiguiere]

All of this. From the user standpoint, SCSI was more expensive but SCSI was more verstatile, and allowed external devices. The external Zip drive for PC was over Parallel port. Scanner (consumer grades) on PC used Parallel port while higher end either used SCSI or and extension card (ISA or PCI). Parallel port was designed for printing. While on Mac, just SCSI. Mac kept SCSI port until USB, even though they already had switched to internal IDE drives at least on the lower end. SCSI lost appeal when USB appeared. An guess what? The iMac is the one that popularised USB devices, while dropping SCSI. SCSI lives on. ATAPI, SATA, USB Mass Storage, all use the SCSI protocol on top of their respective interface. (proof: on Linux SATA and USB drive are /dev/sdX, like SCSI, while IDE drives are /dev/hdX)

[@TheJeremyHolloway]

@@hfiguiere there were external ZIP Drives for the PC that also had SCSI ports on them... not just for Macs...

[@hfiguiere]

@@TheJeremyHolloway which were the same as for the Mac (except the package and the PC formated disk). But how many PC users had a SCSI adapter? That was my point. USB levelled up everything (and it took the iMac to have it more widely adopted beyond mice)

[@Doesntcompute2k]

@@hfiguiere I still have two of my SCSI ZIP and one of my SCSI JAZ drives. :) Wonder what will fit on a 1GB JAZ these days? hmmmmm

[@NomadicDmitry]

Raspberry Pi seemed like a toy in the beginning, but now with every single new iteration I feel like it has more and more potential. Very interesting project, thanks for sharing!

[@TommyCrosby]

Using SCSI in pro/consumer products before the arrival of SATA was a good move, it made those systems so slightly snappier.

[@Dant2142]

SCSI definitely has one other advantage in that it poses minimal load on the host CPU to access a drive. I remember some years ago there was someone on the VOGONS forum playing around with a PCI chipset 486 system they had. With a dedicated DVD decoder card, a PCI SCSI HBA, and a SCSI DVD drive, they were able to get a 486 DX2-66 to playback a DVD in Windows 95 while at only 3% CPU usage. Using an IDE DVD Drive, it was more like 30%. For any kind of specific usage or gaming, you're probably going to build a system massively more powerful than you need it to accomplish what you have in mind, so it won't make a noticeable difference, but that is an advantage.

[@stevesether]

This has zero to do with SCSI, or IDE. SCSI and IDE are interfaces between a host controller, and the device. What you're talking about has to do with if the data transfer from the drive to the host involves host CPU, or if it can write directly to memory. That means that the drive controller must support writing directly to memory, it's not a property of SCSI itself. Technically, this is called DMA (Direct memory accessible), or PIO (programmed IO). DMA essentially lets the host controller talk directly with memory, rather than let the CPU on the computer handle this. In about 1991 I bought my first HD for my Amiga 500, a Quantum 105MB SCSI HD, along with a Trumpcard SCSI adapter to connect it to the Amiga. My friend bought a the same exact HD, same Amiga model 500, and a GVP SCSI adapter. (I think the GVP card was a bit more expensive). We were curious which was faster, so we ran some benchmarks one day between the two systems. His Amiga 500 was just a bit faster (10-20% maybe) at transfers than mine, which we later found out was because his GVP card supported DMA, which mine only supported PIO. We didn't think to test CPU usage between, but I'd suspect his system would have had a lot lower CPU usage because of the DMA. In the end, it likely didn't matter too much and the speeds weren't too noticeable,, but it was interesting to find out how this stuff worked under the hood. The same was true for PCs, though the separation wasn't as clean. IIRC IDE drives originally only supported PIO, and DMA mode was added later. The controller of course had to suport DMA, and support also had to be enabled in the OS as well. So again, the real world of SCSI vs IDE isn't so simple, much like Action Retro gets at.

[@lee4hmz]

The advantages SCSI had over IDE were amazing back in the mid-1990s, but ATA got better (Ultra DMA helped a lot) and SATA has been better than parallel SCSI in raw speed for years now. The video mentioned SAS, but SAS is itself a variant of SATA, and most SAS hosts will accept SATA drives with the right (passive) adapter.

[@MCAlexisYT]

“Modern Apple is allergic to _ports”_ - Action Retro, 2021

[@TheSulross]

the way I rationalized this to feel better about it - it's just a SCSI-attached file server (instead of being a NAS)

[@retropuffer2986]

Between the SCSI and ADB there was still a lot of expandability potential for slotless models. It's true you had to fiddle but back in the day but the owners knew the "SCSI rules" by heart.

[@RayBellis]

The vintage sampler community has been actively working on these for several months now, too. The original project started several years ago in Japan but didn't gain much traction because the only suppliers of the boards were in Japan and the docs were all in Japanese.

[@aubreymcgee8230]

Have any vintage sampler documents been made available for RASCSI compatibility?

[@helfire23]

Sorry you had a few issues on the web interface! I've pushed a fix to the develop branch that allows for better file uploads. As for the cd I'll have to try to reproduce that, haven't seen it fail before but shoud work with any file. Maybe a weird url or filename? Great review!

[@ActionRetro]

Thank you Eric!!

[@stinkertonsden]

Truely a great addition to the retro computing community! I have a Powerbook 5300c that I replaced the drive with an IDE-->CF solution but those tend to slow down over time (lack of garbage collection). I can't wait to try this on both that and the PowerMac 7200 I have.

[@SalvoDan]

Could it support emulating a SCSI Scanner or Printer? This would be an interesting way of loading images onto the Vintage Computer or producing PDFs for a modern DTP workflow.

[@ActionRetro]

@@SalvoDan Oh, what a cool idea

[@draggonhedd]

I use castoff scsi3 disks from servers with an adapter board. Theyre reliable and really fast, and astonishingly cheap. 10$ for the adapter and less than 10$ for the drives. I have a 160gb one in my Powecenter Pro

[@ninline2000]

I have a 5.25" Full Height SCSI hard drive from my Commodore Amiga days. It still works. It sounds like a garbage truck traveling down a gravel road though. SCSI was MUCH faster on my 7mhz 68000 equipped Amiga 500. It's really noticeable on low end equipment. On modern equipment of course, the processing power is so high that it doesn't matter.

[@PotatoFi]

Wow, I am blown away by the interest in RaSCSI cases! I'm running out of stock of pretty much everything... so if something is missing from my store, check back in a few days! I'll keep the printers running around the clock to try to get caught up!

[@ActionRetro]

Hooray!

[@PotatoFi]

@@davidcarlin5336 Prusa MK3S! I also recommend the Prusa Mini - results are 95 percent as good for quite a bit less. I use Prusament for production parts but even cheap Hatchbox filament from Amazon looks just fine.

[@PotatoFi]

@@davidcarlin5336 feel free to get in touch if you have any questions! Twitter, website, Etsy, etc.

[@colinpye1430]

I bet this would be a good fit for my NeXT slab, and maybe even my DG Aviion!

[@gorkushka]

I bought the book on the Motorola 88K at my college bookstore and read it! Loved that chip. Boxen I have had coded on and worked on over the years: CDC Cyber 6600, DEC VAXen (750 to 8800), DECstation, SGI Indigo/Challenge XL, KSR1 (!!!), DEC Alpha, Sun 3/80 (68030), Sun SPARC 5, RS/6000 Model 250, HP 9000/725. Then Linux came, and since 2003 that's all I've ever worked on - with some Diversions to z/OS and z/VM here and there.

[@aa-au]

Thanks for the informative video. I have also watched Mac84's video, and I am slowly understanding the power of the RaSCSI. I just love the cool external mini-IIcx/IIci/Q700 type case!

[@alextirrellRI]

I had no idea the project had progressed this much already. Especially the web interface. Now I really need to get one!

[@ifrit05]

OMG this is amazing! Gotta get one of these stat! Even SCSI Ethernet emulation? This is way awesome.

[@MacintoshMen]

Astounding job the guys did there. I might even pick one up in case I get hold of one of those older Macs in the future.

[@locnar1701]

SCSI strong points that mattered at the time: - Devices you could daisy chain internally and externally. - The original IDE spec at the time maxed out at 512Mb (Until eIDE), SCSI had no real limit - SCSI was expensive due to it having very high quality standards that dictated good hardware and signaling. IDE had very loose specs comparatively.

[@CommonSense-hy2sn]

Wasn't also IDE just a 16 bit ISA bus on a ribbon cable? If so then an IDE port on a PC was basically free to implement, whereas implementing IDE on a non-x86 platform required a controller chip.

[@locnar1701]

@@CommonSense-hy2sn I could not say, but that would fit within the 16bit ISA math of the 512Mb limit on the drives. In the end, I have no idea and might make a Saturday night of that research.

[@lee4hmz]

@@locnar1701 Even with non-PC machines, the logic to interface to IDE was just an address decoder and a few buffers. ATA didn't rely on any special features of the ISA bus (like the clocks or the DMA circuitry), and the controller registers were on the drive and not in the interface. Also, old IDE could go up to 65536 x 16 x 255 blocks (2^28 blocks), which is where the 128 GB limitation some older machines with IDE have comes from; the 512 MB limit was imposed by IBM (since they repurposed the floppy disk BIOS interface for hard drives), and wasn't remedied until the INT 13 extensions came out in the mid-1990s.

[@eDoc2020]

@@lee4hmz I thought old IDE could only do about 8 gigabytes before LBA was added to the spec as in CHS mode they only went up to 16383/16/63. The interface might have supported more but I've never seen that used in practice. As you said the 504 meg limit was the combination of ATA and IBM CHS. That was partly alleviated by CHS remapping on PC BIOSes.

[@lee4hmz]

@@eDoc2020 That's another BIOS limitation. ATA has always been able to do 28-bit addressing; it's just that the standard INT 13h interface couldn't use it all (in this case, it's because INT 13h only provides 6 bits for the sector number). 16383/16/63 is a magic number that was added by ATA-5 to avoid confusing old CHS-only hosts.

[@cleitindaezquina]

very good educational and informational video!

[@StevenClements]

One of my favorite bands... "The Talking Hands"

[@kbhasi]

(8:14) I should mention that there are "H" variants of the Zero series that come with the GPIO pins already soldered on.

[@AWriterWandering]

That wouldn’t work in this case though, since the pins had to be soldered upside down

[@KayakTN]

That’s awesome. I love the little case.

[@EcoGreensFarm]

Your enthusiasm is catching!

[@DavidStahlOLDHAPPyMACs]

Sean Your Pressuring Me To Get Back into The 68k Macs But That is really Neat SCSI Solution Great Info

[@mccrh7737]

So epic :) Going to buy a couple for sure :)

[@DaimlerSleeveValve]

Not many realise that SCSI was a development of SASI (Shugart Associates System Interface), which appeared 5 years earlier. Some SASI devices could work with SCSI-1 controllers; they used the same 50-pin connectors.

[@ActionRetro]

Woah that's really interesting!

[@ThinkDifferentlier]

And the Oscar for single hand choreography goes to... Action Retro!

[@ActionRetro]

😂😂 Thank you thank you!

[@mingohagen]

single handed applause!

[@JeffTiberend]

@@ActionRetro @ChrisFix would be impressed.

[@jackpijjin4088]

Now, this? This excites me. Really want to get my old MacSE running all the music software from its day.

[@EvLoutonian]

ooh, that's what I want to do! What programs do you recommend to look out for? I have a serial (MOTU) MIDI interface ready to go, but have never previously used a MAcSE for sequencing and such. Keen to hear what you're up to! (:

[@DeathMetalDerf]

LGR sent me here, and I'm so glad he did. Instant subscribe and bell-click for sure! Thanks for the heads up, LGR!!!!!

[@ActionRetro]

Awesome!!

[@fhb3705]

Looks great. Just the thing for my LCII (and odd Amigas)

[@organiccold]

I left a like just before watch it because i know i will love it :)

[@AugurIliKur]

Reminds me of the TRS-80 scene in the 90s. People were using Pentium chips strictly to do memory bank switching for upgraded Hitachi 6309 CPUs running OS9 (UNIX).

[@Jorcorand]

This videos are so cool. Yesterday i reborn my old power mac 7200 :)

[@ActionRetro]

That's awesome! Thank you!

[@bufordmaddogtannen]

Well... In 1987 there still was not a mainstream standardised interface in the PC desktop world, and we needed hard drive cards with an interface specific to the drive. Later, non-scsi cdrom drives came with 3 competing connection standards. Ide/ata if I recall correctly started to become mainstream around 1990 and was extended to other devices around 1994 (with the atapi standard) bringing cdrom drives under the same interface.

[@Bogomil76]

12:39 you know that the newest Pi Imager has the ability to activate ssh from scratch and you can setup your wireless with your mouse?

[@oelrich]

its also just as easy to do it the normal way too

[@MikesFutureRetro]

Just got my PiSCSI … installation going down this weekend on my Mac Performa ( or LC3- same machine but different badge )

[@lBonaCl]

There are so many uses for a Raspberry Pi Zero, these drive emulators being one of the most impressive ones. The SSH is disabled by default in the Raspbian OS image, the Pi itself doesn't care. Though in practice the only thing matters is that it isn't on by default, why or by what - doesn't matter.

[@CC-ke5np]

There was actually an advantage for home users using SCSI. SCSI controllers were not supported by the board BIOS. They came with their own BIOS ROM which extended the BIOS of the board. This broke the size limit without using tricks or relying on BIOS updates for large IDE devices.

[@jomeyqmalone]

Very cool product and video. This inspired me to finally replace the hard drive in my SE that died a decade ago. I ordered the same parts, wrong sided GPIO pins and all... I have no idea how you managed to desolder the 40 pin header with just solder braid. For anyone in the same boat that doesn't want to spend $100+ on a proper desolder tool, the velleman vtdesol3u was a lifesaver at under $20. Now I just need to do a 7.0.1 install instead of the 6.0.8 boot floppy I was using, and hopefully get the Daynaport functionality working over wifi

[@RWBHere]

Heh! That has to be one of the craziest uses of a 1000 MHz-clocked Raspberry Pi. Thanks for the video. 🙂👍

[@glitchedmac]

I think you had a bit of an impact on his sales! hahah. Sold out for now :) This looks awesome.

[@petevenuti7355]

I used to only use SCSI on my PC's. My favorite was a DPT caching RAID controller that supported multiple LUNs and target mode so (theoretically) over a hundred drives could be connected to a single bus! I have to check out this gadget! I wonder if LUNs could be implemented.....

[@eDoc2020]

I'm 100% sure that LUNs could be implemented, but the code is confusing enough to me that I don't know where the changes would need to be made.

[@the_holy_forestfairy]

Excited Hand on the loose again! Thumps up! The first time without an Intro?

[@ehs03y3ol]

I loved watching you disolder the wrong side GPIO connector X"D

[@mme725]

"You know what I'm serially attached too..." Man, that was a great transition to your Patreon plug X'D

[@FoxMccloud42]

6:55 This surface comes from the powder coated sheet of the Prusa i3 Mk3.

[@rougenaxela]

4:25 It's not just SAS. SCSI lived on in other big and important ways. 1) ADAPI was a protocol for squeezing SCSI commands through an IDE or SATA bus. Basically every IDE/SATA CD/DVD drive ever, natively spoke in SCSI commands, adapted to IDE/SATA via ADAPI. 2) The USB Mass Storage protocol, used by basically every flash drive ever, is essentially SCSI-over-USB, as far as the command set and deepest nested protocol layer is concerned.

[@MonochromeWench]

IDE was designed specifically for use in 286 PCs so easy to imagine that bus being far less than ideal for other platforms as the IDE bus is just an extension to the 286 16bit ISA bus. SCSI on a pc is probably not faster than ide but on other platforms with a much faster host bus scsi would be faster. I'd say scsi's big advantage was not speed but external connectivity

[@lee4hmz]

All true; IDE wasn't really comparable with a good DMA SCSI card until multiword DMA type 4 and multiple sectors per interrupt were widely implemented, which wasn't until about 1995-1996, and it wasn't really *great* until Ultra DMA around 1997-1998.

[@nickwallette6201]

This is what I was thinking too. IDE was so tightly coupled to the AT platform that non-PC platforms couldn’t really just use it directly. SCSI was kind of the go-to choice. In terms of speed, it came down to how the controller communicated with the system bus, and how fast the actual disk was. All the bandwidth comparisons were pretty much academic until we started cramming new drives into old computers. (Now 4MB/sec SCSI throughput is ... quaint.)

[@chrisyannella8682]

I could daisy chain 2 computers to one external scsi drive. As long as I was not writing to the same file it worked perfectly.

[@auteurfiddler8706]

I think you are understating how much better SCSI was. When I bought my first hard drive for my brand new in 1987 Tandy 3000HL, the alternative was a MFM hard drive. If your backup battery went dead, you had to run a setup program from a floppy (360) to enter the drive parameters. If you drive's wasn't on the list, you had to select the one closest, but no larger than yours. Potentially you could destroy your data if you enter the wrong numbers. RLL drives offered more capacity using an overpacking scheme that seemed insane even then. And didn't cost less than a SCSI system. So I bought a 20 mb Miniscribe SCSI drive and a 16 bit Future Domain ISA controller. And was delighted with it. Later, I think it served just as well in a 486/33 system and it still worked fine. SCSI actually came before PC's were even offered for sale.

[@stevesether]

If you're talking about "MFM" and not IDE, I'd agree, but this is a different problem entirely. MFM wasn't really a type of hard drive interface like IDE/SCSI. MFM and RLL were largely all proprietary standards where hard drive, and the hard drive controller were tightly integrated. So if your "MFM" hard drive failed, you couldn't just go and buy a new "MFM" drive to replace it. You had to go buy an entire new integrated card+drive. The innovation of IDE and SCSI was that they had the HD electronics integrated with the drive itself, with a standard protocol (IDE/SCSI) to communicate with the host controller. So practically speaking, MFM (and RLL) didn't really have any meaning, and different manufacturers of the drive+controller could mean completely different experiences. The tightly integrated card+controller didn't last much past the mid 80s, after which it was replaced with IDE.

[@lee4hmz]

@@stevesether On MFM, you could swap the drive out for another one (on the early PC/XT controllers, it may have been limited to 10 or 20 MB, but later third-party models had dynamic config), but what you couldn't do was swap the same drive between two different controllers unless they were the exact same model. You *might* have been able to get away with them being the same make, though I can't remember if this actually worked.

[@chriscalderon1337]

The download and mount functionality is kinda amazing lol.

[@frstesiste7670]

SCSI unloaded some work from the CPU. Not important now and mostly not important then but it was a slight advantage on really old CPUs and use cases. The important bit for me was that SCSI was the only fast external option. I needed it for Nikon and HP scanners, Jaz drives, external CD drive and a Data Minidisk.

[@baitsnatcha]

Maybe I just was a SCSI fanboy back in the day, but I have pretty fond memories of my PC build using a bunch of striped 10k rpm LVD drives in an old COMPAQ backplane, all of which was retired from some server at work. It was hot as hell, enormously loud but no IDE solution would have come close in terms of speed...

[@MK-of7qw]

"can't come to work today. I have a case of the Scuzzy"

[@joeysluzer1913]

I worked at a computer store during the late 80's and early 90's. Apple used SCSI because IDE drives didn't even exist when the first Macs came out. Even when they did eventually come out in 1986, they were 4200RPM (I think) so slower than SCSI drives at the time. Apple probably already had their designs for the next few years built around a SCSI controller, so it would have been difficult to change to IDE. Also, since USB didn't exist, SCSI was the perfect platform to add multiple simultaneous devices to your computer.

[@yorgle]

RaScsi (And BlueScsi) is awesome! I've been poking at a live physical user interface for it so you can configure it without needing a web interface. (expanding the use of the display to include a rotary controller, and new menu system). :D

[@jorisw_]

Mindblowing. May have to get this for my Mac Plus! Does the PotatoFi come in severely yellowed?

[@ActionRetro]

🤣

[@MegaManNeo]

That's where the Pi Zero really shines. Albeit being far more powerful than vintage computers and videogame consoles, it actually brings new life to those as well. Again, I'm no Apple user but this is fantastic stuff done by the community.

[@jerezer2009]

would love to know what filament they used to print that case I been looking for that color

[@garyclouse4164]

SCSI had an advantage over IDE interface you may be unaware of: SCSI devices were intelligent peripherals that sent data in bursts along the bus. IDE drives added a similar capability with ATA spec, which survives in the SATA standard. this was particularly useful in servers.

[@fmlazar]

Using the Paspberry PI Imager hit the control shift X before you hit the last step to download and you can preconfigure options such as Wifi configuration and overclocking as well as root password

[@jarnoldp]

I want that for my windows 98 machine! That is awesome!

[@Codeaholic1]

That case is adorable. Too bad the power sticks out the side and not the back.

[@mal2ksc]

A right angle connector would go a long way toward making that not so obvious. So would a white cord.

[@terbog]

SCSI Configuration is actually kinda easy, even when adding devices, since all you need to get right is the ID and connect it somewhere between your last device and the SCSI Card. But i guess, when you are able to connect Master and Slave in the wrong order. What i can say tho, the drives were super reliable, drives from 1998 made it way into the 2006s for me, until i had to replace them due to size considerations.

[@Gab_Rezende]

Great video! Can you boot from RaSCSI? I think you could, but not a CD-ROM, right?

[@SirRigbyBaconKaiser]

This is interesting. My perception of SCSI adoption was more to do with the Apple's computers being widely spread through the music industry. Also by "coincidence" SCSI was also the same interface that was used in a lot of samplers/synthesizers.

[@michaelcharach]

I remember selling 9 gig scsi Hard drives for like a grand when I was in the IT business in the late 90s.. most of the servers and machines that these went into would have 2 to 10 or them back in the day.

[@RicardoRamosRetrocomputacao]

These guys have to create a version of this for IDE X86

[@kungfujesus06]

You could also host the images subdirectory over an NFS or smb mount, potentially backed by faster and more reliable storage than an SD card. Of course, you're subject to the reliability and performance of your wifi at that point, but it's an interesting idea. I think for a lot of these macs you are basically limited to scsi2 or scsi3 speeds, so it's probably not hard to keep up with their controllers

[@fsfs555]

SCSI is Small Computer System Interface: it's more than just a hard drive interface, it's a versatile and relatively high-speed interface (5MB/s for standard narrow SCSI) for a variety of up to 7 devices both internal and external (scanners, printers, disk drives, video controllers, network controllers, etc). AT Attachment, on the other hand, was originally designed for internal hard drives and internal hard drives alone; the original standard did not natively support anything else, which is why ATA Packet Interface had to be invented, and it's still an internal-only 2-device-maximum interface. Fun fact: ATAPI uses SCSI commands over ATA to support all of the expanded features such as removable disks. Also (for PC users), SCSI doesn't have the various ridiculous capacity limitations and doesn't require manual C/H/S configuration like older ATA controllers do.

[@eDoc2020]

SCSI _does_ have similar capacity limitations. It just seems hosts handled them better.

[@fsfs555]

@@eDoc2020 From what I've read most SCSI capacity caps were imposed by OS file system limits (mostly in FAT and FAT32 but also HFS), not by limitations of SCSI itself, and thus could be avoided by partitioning the drive. By contrast ATA had known hardware limits at 528MB, 7.9GB, 8.4GB, and 137GB depending on the host system, in addition to the file system limits, but unlike SCSI these limits could not be avoided by partitioning since it was a BIOS/hardware problem, not an OS problem.

[@thumbwarriordx]

"How did they get this texture on here? Easy, that's the bottom of the print. It's the bed sheet texture. This is not always feasible to do, but anything with one big flat surface comes out so good.

[@herbmyers805]

I have CMD Commodore SCSI drive so now a better option to add to it via the SCSI 50 pin adapter on the back!!!!!

[@ryablow]

Do you think this would enable any video out for a Powerbook 145B?

[@stumpybear60]

I hope it will work with the Commodore Amiga A3000. The only time I had trouble with SCSI on the A3000 was when I tried to install a free version of UNIX. AmigaOS wasn’t very picky about SCSI termination but that BSD version of UNIX sure was.

[@chrismckay3868]

That looks quite sweet, although think some sort of barrel plug with a vintage looking wall wart would let it camouflage a bit easier into vintage setups ;) Micro USB? Man this thing was way ahead of it's time XD

[@squeeeb]

This is great. That web interface is a game changer from the usual scsi2sd type adapters. May have to snag one of these for my X68000 at some point...the novelty of transferring files via slow ass MO Discs has worn off !!

[@JeffTiberend]

Wish you would have put some links in for how to get the parts you got to make this.

[@MoraFermi]

SCSI lives on in far more than just SAS! It's in USB (three separate times actually! USB is weird), SAS (which is legacy bus in servers nowadays), SATA (well, partially, since ATA implements a subset of scsi functionality) and many weird and wonderful server technologies like iSCSI, FibreChannel and more. These days it's just a universal data storage command set, not a specific bus.

[@deepsignalstudios]

Can you explain how the network connection is maid? Is it through USB or wifi?

[@rotomola7506]

Good video

[@Hiraghm]

iirc on the Amiga scsi drives were DMA... they could access the memory directly, which was both faster and better for actual multitasking.

[@stuartcastle2814]

A colleague of mine in the 90s made the mistake of buying a pc from PC World. Not the US magazine. A UK based computer retailer that is widely (and deservedly IMO) criticised by pretty much anyone with computer experience in the UK. He didn’t really know PCs but needed one as a student. So, he asked them for advice, I can’t remember most of the specs. I think it was a mid range 486. The one spec I do remember is they sold him one that only had SCSI. Apparently SCSI was the future and IDE was on the way out. Arguably, long term, they were right. That was 10 years later though, when SATA became a thing. In the meantime, his hard drive failed after a couple of years,and as it was out of warranty, PC World wanted a small fortune to replace the drive. So, he came to me. IIRC, I found an IDE card that worked with his PC, and he managed to buy both that and 250 meg IDE drive (his SCSI drive was 250 meg) for less than the price of a replacement SCSI drive. Now, he might well have had a SCSI drive that was faster the the IDE drive he ended up with, but bearing in mind he was using Windows 95, and only used it to play some low end games and for using MS office, he likely wouldn’t have noticed a difference.

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

Can you run the old Hard Disk ToolKit 3.0 on a Mac OS 9.x Mac and see how it works with it.

[@sal.m2A]

so much handy

[@neophytealpha]

Interesting device.

[@AngeloTelesforo]

Great! Gotta buy one of these! Can you boot the machine out of the RaSCSI?

[@tonykuker4543]

Absolutely you can! The Raspberry Pi OS does take ~30 seconds (probably more on a Pi Zero) to boot. So, you need to make sure you can boot your Pi before you start up the Mac. Or.... if you don't have any other boot drives available, the Mac will just show the flashing question mark for a little bit. Once the Pi boots up, the Mac will see the new SCSI device and boot from it with no problem.

[@itogi]

Judging by the recent products that use Pi, everything can be emulated with it.

[@brianbuchholtz1521]

I'm hoping there are plans to expand the project to wide SCSI. Options are a lot more limited for those who prefer 68 pins...

[@bricklearns]

Can you demo the wifi/ethernet emulation? Curious if that works well

[@OMightyBuggy]

Does it work on a Mac Plus over SCSI?

[@Otakunopodcast]

Does the RaSCSI physically fit in a "classic" style Mac? I'm working on refurbing some of my classic Macs (SEs and SE/30s) and unfortunately those old SCSI drives that are in them are at death's door... they still work (for now) but are starting to make some very unwholesome noises. I hesitate to go to a SCSI2SD due to the cost, but the RaSCSI looks like a very cost effective solution (especially since I already have a couple Pi Zero's and MicroSD cards lying about, so wouldn't need to buy those)

[@ulrichkalber9039]

could you use the compute power of the pi as coprocessor for the mac?

[@tonykuker4543]

Not really through the SCSI bus. The SCSI bus would be a huge bottleneck, even on the oldest Macs. The PiStorm project is able to plug a Pi into the 68000 socket on an Amiga. There are folks working to get this working with Macs as well. (github.com/captain-amygdala/pistorm)

[@neophytealpha]

The platter speeds for SCSI was faster than IDE for a long time, before we got EIDE.

[@stevenclark2188]

For retrocomputer purposes I think SCSI drives were generally 'smarter' so there may have been a reduction in CPU load. Which wouldn't matter much when your usual user's single task is blocked waiting for IO.

[@lee4hmz]

They typically were; most good SCSI drives either had actual servo hardware or a second CPU, so they could handle incoming and outgoing requests without having to deal with housekeeping tasks like moving the heads or keeping the motor running (which some drives, particularly Conners and some of the Seagate drives that were based on them, tasked the main CPU with).

[@criticalposts3143]

From my experience doing 3d-printing I'd say that texture was achieved by using painter's tape or build tak as a surface. Have a good day!

[@criticalposts3143]

Of course, something similar like a reusable build plate included with many printers nowadays, such as the venerable Prusa Mk3, may also be in use there, though that lies outside my expertise, I am afraid