[rescue] SCSI2SD formatting

[Romain Dolbeau]

2016-02-19 23:42 GMT+01:00 Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com>:

>   I respectfully submit that you give real hard drives another look.  I
> routinely put 15+ year old SCSI drives in machines and I cannot recall
> the last time I had one fail.  This is not one or two...I'm running
> about twenty now.  With the wear specs on the flash chips in SD cards,
> the drives will likely last a whole lot longer in a workstation
> configuration where the drives are getting hit hard. (as opposed to a
> data logger in a Raspberry Pi or something like that)


True as it is, the SCSI2SD has advantages of its own.

You can get a lot more data than in a vintage hard drive (not many narrow
drives larger than 2GB, everybody in the workstation market switched to
wide SCSI).

It's lighter and less noisy :-)

They're very easy to backup - just put the SD card in your regular
desktop/laptop, and a single 'dd' later you have a full-drive backup of your
workstation. Not many amateur collectors still have the ability to connect
parallel SCSI devices to their main system, I think (I know I don't - SAS
has superseded it...)

And a single card can be split in many "virtual" drives - so with a single
8 GB
card, you can e.g. have 4 2GB "virtual" drives. All of them can have a
bootable
partition inside the first GB. So you can have SunOS, Solaris, NetBSD and
NeXtSTEP for demo purposes without ever needing to change the card.

Or you can dedicate one card per OS, and easily switch from one to another
[as long as they are all configured for the same drive configuration - it's
stored
in the SCSI2SD device, not the card :-( ]

The SCSI2S is far from perfect but it's a very convenient way of
resurrecting
some old systems. But it's too expensive :-(

Cordially,

-- 
Romain Dolbeau