[HECnet] SSD for Vax

[Mark Wickens]

On 10/10/2013 15:08, Cory Smelosky wrote:
On Thu, 10 Oct 2013, Johnny Billquist wrote:

On 2013-10-10 09:46, Mark Wickens wrote:
On 10/10/2013 08:17, Daniel Soderstrom wrote:
Has anyone tries this? Running my Vaxstation non-stop reminds me how
much noise these old drives make.

Has anyone tried SSD drives? Must be good for the PSU it terms of heat
and current draw.

Daniel

Sent from my iPhone
There has been very little success with IDE to SCSI converters on this
age of machine.

Hmm. bad IDE to SCSI converters?

Remember also that even 4000/90 vintage VAXstations generally have an
upper limit of 18GB.

Uh? That got to be a limit in VMS in that case. I can't see how the hardware would have that limit.

I don't recall anyone even getting an IDE drive to work, let alone an SSD.

IDE and SSD are two completely unrelated things as such. However, if the SSD have an IDE interface, then you obviously need the IDE to SCSI converter.


Iirc solid-state SCSI drives existed.

Would love to be proved wrong however! I'm surprised someone hasn't
written a software based SCSI drive emulator the same way that you get
floppy emulators.

Probably mostly because of speed issues. You have some very tight timing requirements, and a SCSI interface runs way faster than a floppy.


Which is a good thing. ;)

Consider running the machine diskless, booted off the network with
off-node disks.

That definitely also works.

      Johnny



I believe Nemonix have both solid state and new drop-in replacements for VAX drives, but I'm quite sure you'll be into mega-$$$.

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