[HECnet] SSD for Vax

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Oct 11, 2013, at 3:21 AM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com<mailto:md.benson at gmail.com>> wrote:


On 11 Oct 2013, at 07:47, Daniel Soderstrom <snaggs at mac.com<mailto:snaggs at mac.com>> wrote:

There are plenty of CF or SD cards under 18gb. Also, there must be some way of only using part of a drive, as these cards are used extensively in old Macs which have a 170mb boot drive limit.

I'm fully aware of that, in fact I plan to try using a 4GB CF card on my 4000/60 at some stage to see what it does. You linked   to a *SATA* to SCSI adapter    intended for use on hard drives?

I'm aware that SATA to CF/SD adapters are available, I used one for a while with a CF card. That may be an option but like others have said the reliability can be variable. Also some companies that offer embedded micro-PC stuff also sell 8GB and 16GB SATA SSDs that might be an option too, maybe? I am fairly sure I have a 16GB one spare somewhere.

CF and SD are both flash storage cards, but they have completely different interfaces.

CF is SATA with a different connector.   A CF to SATA adapter is nothing more than a pair of connectors and some wires.

SD uses a serial packet protocol, a generalization of the one used by MMC devices.   It's not SCSI, but it feels a bit like it because of that packet and command/response style of doing things.   Also, SD has an extremely complex and strange initialization sequence.

I'm not familiar with (S)ATA to SD converters.   Such a beast would be fairly complex, similar in difficulty to an ATA to SCSI (SATA to SAS) converter.

paul