BlueSCSI
I've not had the greatest luck with old Mac SCSI hard drives lately. The 40MB drive from my Mac Classic melted in Texas heat where it had been stored. The 500GB Seagate in my Mac IIcx has finally reached the point where it returns more errors than valid data. This is the point where most will recommend SCSI2SD, but with recent models reaching nearly $100, it's not the most approachable solution.
Enter BlueSCSI. I first read about BlueSCSI on a thread on 68kmla and immediately ordered a kit. Assembling the kit took about 45 minutes. I grabbed a disk image I had been using with Cockatrice (a Basilisk fork), copied it to a spare microSD card, renamed the image HD00.hda, then dropped the card into BlueSCSI.
My first test subject was the Mac SE I recently repaired. It took a moment to recognize the new SCSI device then booted right up. It properly recognized the disk as SCSI device 0, as specified by the image file name in the SD card.
Next was my Mac IIcx. It booted System 7.5.3 with no problems, and booted a clean install of System 6.0.8 in about 5 seconds (years ago, the same machine booted 6.0.7 in about 9 seconds from hard drive). I ran some benchmarks in Snooper to see how it was running.
Read performance averaged about 1MB/s; Write performance was just under 0.5MB/s; and Seek times were virtually nonexistent.
Overall, I'm quite pleased. I've got it installed in an old external SCSI hard drive case at the moment so I can move between machines easily. I have multiple images set up, which properly mount as multiple SCSI hard drives. The only problems I've noticed so far is sometimes images aren't recognized if their filenames are too long, and the device is eerily quiet in these old machines compared to the old hard drive noise.
It's not as widely compatible as SCSI2SD, with only later 68000 Macs and most 68030 Macs officially supported, and initial support for Mac Plus recently announced. I don't have an unsupported 68k Mac to test with, but I might connect it to my SuperMac c500 just to see what happens.
I'm hoping to order a few more kits. I would like to have one each to install in my SE, IIcx, and Classic.
This post was not sponsored in any way, and I have no connection with Eric Helgeson, creator of BlueSCSI.
