[bjames]

I have seen post of people successfully installing the scsi to sd drive into their machines.  What drive model are you using?  Are the drives automatically recognized as a scsi drive?

My plan is the install one in the Indy (as the floppy), and one in one of the Octane drive bays using a sled.  Not sure about the O2 yet, but the purpose is to share files between the machines and a windows box.

[Raion]

The Indy and Indigo2 are both good candidates. The Octane isn't. The reason is the Octane is a low voltage differential SCSI system, not a single ended. Devices are usually backwards compatible, but controllers are NOT. So in addition to it being slow, it could ruin the device. The 80-50 pin adapters used by the DAT drives are passive.

[jpstewart]

Sorry, Raion, but I have to disagree with your comments.

The Octane is documented to use Ultra-Wide SCSI.  That's the last of the single-ended (SE) versions.  Ultra2(-Wide) was the first of the low voltage differential (LVD) generations (followed by Ultra-160 and Ultra-320).  Also, it is well documented that LVD SCSI controllers are backwards compatible.  You can attach SE devices to LVD controllers but that will cause the whole SCSI bus to fall back single-ended mode.

The incompatibilities you're thinking of when you say "it could ruin the device" pertain to high-voltage differential (HVD) SCSI.

[callahan]

My $.02 ...

The SCSI2SD is great ... for limited use cases. It's my standard Indy HD (see my other new post about performance).

However, for your proposed use I'm not so sure. First, they're expensive. $125 or so for a v6 with a good SD card.

Worse than that, though, they're not great for transferring data among machines.

The is really only one way to read data using a PC: usb connection with the SCSI2SD (normally requires removing the whole card) with an atrocious 1.2 MB/S transfer rate (ideal). But, this is the only way to have the logical drives you created show up neatly when you connect the device.

You can also swap the SD card, which should work fine if going from one SCSI2SD to another. But you can't just plug the SD card into your PC and see all of the files. I'm sure there is theoretical way, but AFAIK (someone please jump in if I'm wrong!) there is no off the shelf software that can sort through the SD and find/mount the partitions. Even if there is, I would worry about corrupting the SD card's format in a way that would prevent it from working when reinstalled in a SCSI2SD. Why? Let me continue...

The other big issue is the finickiness of the platform. Once setup and installed, it works great. I've had no issues. But often getting it there is a pain, and a pain in different and unexpected ways for seemingly identical hardware platforms.

So, in conclusion I worry that using SCSI2SD as a modern day floppy-like sneakernet will be costly, slow, frustrating, and in the best cases far slower than just using ftp on your LAN.

[Raion]

Sorry, Raion, but I have to disagree with your comments.

The Octane is documented to use Ultra-Wide SCSI.  That's the last of the single-ended (SE) versions.  Ultra2(-Wide) was the first of the low voltage differential (LVD) generations (followed by Ultra-160 and Ultra-320).  Also, it is well documented that LVD SCSI controllers are backwards compatible.  You can attach SE devices to LVD controllers but that will cause the whole SCSI bus to fall back single-ended mode.

The incompatibilities you're thinking of when you say "it could ruin the device" pertain to high-voltage differential (HVD) SCSI.

I see. I was under the impression that "single-ended" operations only ever used the 50 pin connector, and never the 68 or 80 pin connectors. 

I also was under the impression that LVD controllers are not required to support the fallback modes, but drives/devices were. I.e. a higher speed drive can run single ended. 

Learned something new. Regardless, I concur with Callahan there's no point to this venture. Use FTP, NFS or smbfs.

[KayBee]

For the case of transferring files, having the SGI connected to my home network and using the Mac as a Network File Server has been a game changer for me. The SGI sees a folder on my Mac desktop. That folder is like any other, I can put whatever I want in there and the SGI sees it and from the SGI I can transfer to the SGI. I didn't know how to do this at first, until following Irinikus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-m_-lNivVU

It is Mac centric, but it will give you an understanding of the process.

KB