Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers of
second hand stuff.

Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able to
use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed PCI
speeds.

On Mon, 26 Apr 2021 09:51:47 -0000 (UTC), News 2021
<news21@woa.com.au> wrote:

>Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers of
>second hand stuff.
>
>Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able to
>use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed PCI
>speeds.

Google
https://is.gd/J3Sh2Q
--
Petzl
Good lawyers know the law
Great lawyers know the judge

On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers of
> second hand stuff.
>
> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able to
> use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed PCI
> speeds.

Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
Looking on eBay, there seem to be some of those legacy cards, allegedly brand new. Also PCI-X cards. More crap
that hardly anybody uses. And when you search on Google it throws up ads for parallel printer cards Eff off!

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 04:02:37 -0700, Falscher Bruce scribed:

> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers of
>> second hand stuff.
>>
>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able to
>> use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed PCI
>> speeds.
>
> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.

Unfortunately, I gave away all my old hardware to a young guy starting in
IT who wanted the experience of old PCs and I didnt really think it
through until a bouncing power mains let out the majic smoke on my oldest
running system, a ASUS TUSI with a AMHKxxz cpu. Then I tried to transfer
SCSI card and ard disk to a AMD FX series and no way jose.

Thinking about it again and checking my Devuan(Debian recloak), the old
scsi driver modules are still there and it might just be a matter of
explicitly loading the drivers. I hope so.

I'll wait to test it as the AMD FX system I was trying to shift into use
has now decided to die with a red led POST on CPU. Swapped out the CPU
and it is still indicating a CPU failure, so I'm hopping that it also
suffered from the bouncing power supply and was just on its way out,
rather than the act of plugging in a slow PCI card caused trouble.

The pressure of getting access to the old server files is a bit relieved
as I was able to build up new server(old HW) and get a basic mailer
running fairly quickly with the major settings. Access to the old
settings will just improve the performance. I figure that I can do
without the ~900 aliases listings for a while as the critical ones have
been recovered from recent emails.

> Looking on eBay, there seem to be some of those legacy cards, allegedly
> brand new. Also PCI-X cards. More crap that hardly anybody uses. And
> when you search on Google it throws up ads for parallel printer cards
> Eff off!

Based on ebay prices, I have about $5,000 worth of those cards just in
single channel cards. Goodness knows what the handful of double and
triple channel cards are worth.

If i really get desperate, I still have a yum-cha business server* that I
was gifted a few ears ago. The fact that s worked once when I received it
and the it as a 'Merlin' brand motherboard has ensure its survival. It s
fitted with triple channel SCSI 1 cards, so that mght turn out to be
another route t recover.

*Its main use is to support a camping fridge where I freeze failing hard
disks for recovery(mixed success). Modern seagate barravudas have crappy
reliability IME. Shame Western Digital now have their claws on HGST hard
drives.

On 28/04/2021 8:32 pm, News 2021 wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 04:02:37 -0700, Falscher Bruce scribed:
>
>> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers of
>>> second hand stuff.
>>>
>>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able to
>>> use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed PCI
>>> speeds.
>>
>> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
>> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
>
> Unfortunately, I gave away all my old hardware to a young guy starting in
> IT who wanted the experience of old PCs and I didnt really think it
> through

He probably made some good cash selling it. The "vintage" market is
going covid crazy and really hot ATM.

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 23:13:32 +0800, Clocky scribed:

> On 28/04/2021 8:32 pm, News 2021 wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 04:02:37 -0700, Falscher Bruce scribed:
>>
>>> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>>>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>>>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers
>>>> of second hand stuff.
>>>>
>>>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able
>>>> to use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed
>>>> PCI speeds.
>>>
>>> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
>>> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
>>
>> Unfortunately, I gave away all my old hardware to a young guy starting
>> in IT who wanted the experience of old PCs and I didnt really think it
>> through
>
> He probably made some good cash selling it. The "vintage" market is
> going covid crazy and really hot ATM.

I doubt it. Where is this "vintage market"?
Since most of that hardware would definitely would not run Windows 7, I
doubt the average person would have any interest in it.

At one stage I ran a 'free hardware' page from surplus hardware from the
reuse/recycle groups I volunteered for and the number of takers was only
a few of the clueless, who couldn't read and mostly did not want to pay
postage.

I suspect a lot of the ebay listings are just chancers hoping to repeat
Kezza Packer's line "You only ever get one Alan Bond" and I've had mine.

Falscher Bruce <bruce56@topmail.co.nz> wrote:
> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers of
>> second hand stuff.
>>
>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able to
>> use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed PCI
>> speeds.
>
> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
> Looking on eBay, there seem to be some of those legacy cards,
> allegedly brand new. Also PCI-X cards. More crap
> that hardly anybody uses. And when you search on Google it throws
> up ads for parallel printer cards Eff off!

To be fair, DB25 connectors were used for SCSI too at one point, so
maybe they were old SCSI cards that Google was showing you? They, I
guess, would be "very low PCI speed" (if not ISA) though I'm not
sure what he's really suggesting with that. Does he really want
PCI, or is that his way of talking about cards that aren't PCIe, or
PCI-X?

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 23:02:08 +0000, Computer Nerd Kev scribed:

> Falscher Bruce <bruce56@topmail.co.nz> wrote:
>> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers
>>> of second hand stuff.
>>>
>>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able
>>> to use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed
>>> PCI speeds.
>>
>> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
>> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
>> Looking on eBay, there seem to be some of those legacy cards, allegedly
>> brand new. Also PCI-X cards. More crap that hardly anybody uses. And
>> when you search on Google it throws up ads for parallel printer cards
>> Eff off!
>
> To be fair, DB25 connectors were used for SCSI too at one point, so
> maybe they were old SCSI cards that Google was showing you? They, I
> guess, would be "very low PCI speed" (if not ISA) though I'm not sure
> what he's really suggesting with that. Does he really want PCI, or is
> that his way of talking about cards that aren't PCIe, or PCI-X?

Yes, it is very hard to be certain that everyone is on the same page when
it comes to SCSI as it was available in various forms.

All the cards I have are definitely PCI cards and none are PCI-E or
anything else.

The only time I've seen a DB25 connector as a scsi connector was on very
early domestic scanners and tape drives(the match box format), usually
via plug in a card. They were culled from my collection a long long time
ago. I've even culled all my ISA scsi cards, the last of my ISA slotted
motherboards were dumped, which were probably ASUS PSUS(?) with P2 cpus.

What I was asking, based on a plug and ray transfer of he, is has any one
had any success using a PCI card in a modern computer? i.e. can the
settings be tweaked to slow the bus down enough to handle the card.

It may be a moot point as the actual message from the 'bios' was that it
couldn't find a boot device, which on retrospect mean that it was okay
with the card in the basic PCI slot and I actually needed to boot off
something else and then load the scsi driver to access the storage
plugged in.

Once I get some new hardware, that will release some of what is now my
oldest hardware, so I can experiment.

Apart from recovering a couple of configuration files asap, I'd be
interested in actually running these servers using my collection of SCSI
hard disks, simply because they have outlasted a lot of IDE and SATA hard
drives. The mail servers hard drive is actually a Quantum, which is
apparently legendary for their longevity. Unfortunately, I only have the
one. I'm uncertain of the exact period I've been running it 24x7, but it
as to been close to two decades as it has transferred between motherboard
over the years as decades and from ISA to PCI card.

On 29/04/2021 9:02 am, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
> Falscher Bruce <bruce56@topmail.co.nz> wrote:
>> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers of
>>> second hand stuff.
>>>
>>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able to
>>> use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed PCI
>>> speeds.
>>
>> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
>> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
>> Looking on eBay, there seem to be some of those legacy cards,
>> allegedly brand new. Also PCI-X cards. More crap
>> that hardly anybody uses. And when you search on Google it throws
>> up ads for parallel printer cards Eff off!
>
> To be fair, DB25 connectors were used for SCSI too at one point, so
> maybe they were old SCSI cards that Google was showing you? They, I
> guess, would be "very low PCI speed" (if not ISA) though I'm not
> sure what he's really suggesting with that. Does he really want
> PCI, or is that his way of talking about cards that aren't PCIe, or
> PCI-X?
>
All the 25 pin DIN connectors that I saw were for SASI drives the
forerunner to SCSI.

On 29/04/2021 6:38 am, News 2021 wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 23:13:32 +0800, Clocky scribed:
>
>> On 28/04/2021 8:32 pm, News 2021 wrote:
>>> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 04:02:37 -0700, Falscher Bruce scribed:
>>>
>>>> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>>>>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>>>>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers
>>>>> of second hand stuff.
>>>>>
>>>>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able
>>>>> to use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed
>>>>> PCI speeds.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
>>>> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, I gave away all my old hardware to a young guy starting
>>> in IT who wanted the experience of old PCs and I didnt really think it
>>> through
>>
>> He probably made some good cash selling it. The "vintage" market is
>> going covid crazy and really hot ATM.
>
> I doubt it. Where is this "vintage market"?

Facebook, ebay.

> Since most of that hardware would definitely would not run Windows 7, I
> doubt the average person would have any interest in it.
>

There are a shitload of enthusiasts and many paying silly money. I just
sold a Voodoo 1 card for half the price I could have got on Ebay... $100.

> At one stage I ran a 'free hardware' page from surplus hardware from the
> reuse/recycle groups I volunteered for and the number of takers was only
> a few of the clueless, who couldn't read and mostly did not want to pay
> postage.
>
> I suspect a lot of the ebay listings are just chancers hoping to repeat
> Kezza Packer's line "You only ever get one Alan Bond" and I've had mine.
>

I'm a member of several groups with many members buying and selling
stuff. Covid and nostalgia have created a perfect storm and it's going
nuts. I'm cashing in.

News 2021 <news21@woa.com.au> wrote:
>
> What I was asking, based on a plug and ray transfer of he, is has any one
> had any success using a PCI card in a modern computer? i.e. can the
> settings be tweaked to slow the bus down enough to handle the card.

Well I've gone all my time sticking any PCI card in any PCI slot
and assuming there was no doubt about compatibility besides the
5V/3.3V issue which is pretty obvious from the physical notches.

Checking Wikipedia, it seems that the standard did allow for faster
66MHz bus speed, but it sounds like it didn't exist much outside of
server stuff:

"The PCI specification also provides options for 3.3V signaling,
64-bit bus width, and 66MHz clocking, but these are not commonly
encountered outside of PCI-X support on server motherboards."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_PCI#Conventional_hardware_specifications

I think that if it fits in your PCI slot, it should work without
any concerns over bus speed.

> It may be a moot point as the actual message from the 'bios' was that it
> couldn't find a boot device, which on retrospect mean that it was okay
> with the card in the basic PCI slot and I actually needed to boot off
> something else and then load the scsi driver to access the storage
> plugged in.

Sounds about right. I'm pretty sure one PCI SCSI card I used
displays a boot-time message after the BIOS that's probably
something to do with booting from the SCSI HDD. But I've never
needed to do that on a PC, so I never looked into it. It would
be interesting to know how that works actually...

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

News 2021 <news21@woa.com.au> wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 23:13:32 +0800, Clocky scribed:
>
>> On 28/04/2021 8:32 pm, News 2021 wrote:
>>> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 04:02:37 -0700, Falscher Bruce scribed:
>>>
>>>> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>>>>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>>>>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers
>>>>> of second hand stuff.
>>>>>
>>>>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able
>>>>> to use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed
>>>>> PCI speeds.
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
>>>> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, I gave away all my old hardware to a young guy starting
>>> in IT who wanted the experience of old PCs and I didnt really think it
>>> through
>>
>> He probably made some good cash selling it. The "vintage" market is
>> going covid crazy and really hot ATM.
>
> I doubt it. Where is this "vintage market"?
> Since most of that hardware would definitely would not run Windows 7, I
> doubt the average person would have any interest in it.
>
> At one stage I ran a 'free hardware' page from surplus hardware from the
> reuse/recycle groups I volunteered for and the number of takers was only
> a few of the clueless, who couldn't read and mostly did not want to pay
> postage.
>
> I suspect a lot of the ebay listings are just chancers hoping to repeat
> Kezza Packer's line "You only ever get one Alan Bond" and I've had mine.

Check the "sold listings" box and see what actually sells then.
Sure there are the fools who want $20 for and IDE cable, but there
are also people getting decent money for motherboards, CPUs, ISA
cards etc.

On topic, I sold tens of new-old-stock SCSI 68pin to 50pin
Centronics adapter cables on Ebay for over $20 each a year or
two ago. Many went overseas actually, so those buyers paid almost
another $20 in postage on top of that.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

keithr0 <user@account.invalid> wrote:
> On 29/04/2021 9:02 am, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
>> Falscher Bruce <bruce56@topmail.co.nz> wrote:
>>> And when you search on Google it throws
>>> up ads for parallel printer cards Eff off!
>>
>> To be fair, DB25 connectors were used for SCSI too at one point, so
>> maybe they were old SCSI cards that Google was showing you? They, I
>> guess, would be "very low PCI speed" (if not ISA) though I'm not
>> sure what he's really suggesting with that. Does he really want
>> PCI, or is that his way of talking about cards that aren't PCIe, or
>> PCI-X?
>>
> All the 25 pin DIN connectors that I saw were for SASI drives the
> forerunner to SCSI.

Actually I've got a SCSI ISA card in the old PC that I'm posting
from and it has a DB25 female SCSI connector externally, with a
(more common) 50pin connector inside. I haven't used it for years
though, so I've been meaning to pull it out next time I'm inside.

That makes three DB25 connectors on the back of this PC, one for
LPT, one for RS-232, and one for SCSI. The industry wasn't really
working that hard to avoid confusion back then.

--
__ __
#_ < |\| |< _#

On 29/04/2021 10:22 am, News 2021 wrote:

> It may be a moot point as the actual message from the 'bios' was that it
> couldn't find a boot device, which on retrospect mean that it was okay
> with the card in the basic PCI slot and I actually needed to boot off
> something else and then load the scsi driver to access the storage
> plugged in.

It was a long time ago, but I have had a system that ran off a single
SCSI disk.

On 30/4/21 4:16 pm, keithr0 wrote:
> On 29/04/2021 10:22 am, News 2021 wrote:
>
>> It may be a moot point as the actual message from the 'bios' was that it
>> couldn't find a boot device, which on retrospect mean that it was okay
>> with the card in the basic PCI slot and I actually needed to boot off
>> something else and then load the scsi driver to access the storage
>> plugged in.
>
> It was a long time ago, but I have had a system that ran off a single
> SCSI disk.

It was a long time ago, but I had a system that ran off a single
SASI disk. Actually, the drive was a ST506 but the interface on the SBC
was SASI. IThe interface was a daughterboard that plugged into the Z80
CPU socket and had a socket on it for the Z80 CPU. I used a Xebec S1410
SASI to ST506 interface card - IIRC. The drive was a Tandon 30 Meg
voicecoil stepper drive which looked kind of odd on a Z80 CP/M system.
It was damn fast for the era however. I later updated that SBC for a
revised model that had the SASI/SCSI interface integrated onto the
board. Interesting times indeed.

--

Xeno

Nothing astonishes Noddy so much as common sense and plain dealing.
(with apologies to Ralph Waldo Emerson)

On 30/04/2021 7:37 am, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
> keithr0 <user@account.invalid> wrote:
>> On 29/04/2021 9:02 am, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
>>> Falscher Bruce <bruce56@topmail.co.nz> wrote:
>>>> And when you search on Google it throws
>>>> up ads for parallel printer cards Eff off!
>>>
>>> To be fair, DB25 connectors were used for SCSI too at one point, so
>>> maybe they were old SCSI cards that Google was showing you? They, I
>>> guess, would be "very low PCI speed" (if not ISA) though I'm not
>>> sure what he's really suggesting with that. Does he really want
>>> PCI, or is that his way of talking about cards that aren't PCIe, or
>>> PCI-X?
>>>
>> All the 25 pin DIN connectors that I saw were for SASI drives the
>> forerunner to SCSI.
>
> Actually I've got a SCSI ISA card in the old PC that I'm posting
> from and it has a DB25 female SCSI connector externally, with a
> (more common) 50pin connector inside. I haven't used it for years
> though, so I've been meaning to pull it out next time I'm inside.
>
> That makes three DB25 connectors on the back of this PC, one for
> LPT, one for RS-232, and one for SCSI. The industry wasn't really
> working that hard to avoid confusion back then.
>
Early PC architecture was a mess inside and out.

On 30/04/2021 7:28 am, Computer Nerd Kev wrote:
> News 2021 <news21@woa.com.au> wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 23:13:32 +0800, Clocky scribed:
>>
>>> On 28/04/2021 8:32 pm, News 2021 wrote:
>>>> On Wed, 28 Apr 2021 04:02:37 -0700, Falscher Bruce scribed:
>>>>
>>>>> On Monday, April 26, 2021 at 5:51:47 PM UTC+8, News 2021 wrote:
>>>>>> Does anyone know of any brand and model and reputable source?
>>>>>> It seems they are no longer produced and all I can find is resellers
>>>>>> of second hand stuff.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Otherwise, what is the approach to hobble a modern system to be able
>>>>>> to use one? All the PCI scsi cards I ave appear to be very low speed
>>>>>> PCI speeds.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, I know it's a PITA. I have to keep a PC running old version of
>>>>> Centos, as Red Hat drops support for old SCSI cards.
>>>>
>>>> Unfortunately, I gave away all my old hardware to a young guy starting
>>>> in IT who wanted the experience of old PCs and I didnt really think it
>>>> through
>>>
>>> He probably made some good cash selling it. The "vintage" market is
>>> going covid crazy and really hot ATM.
>>
>> I doubt it. Where is this "vintage market"?
>> Since most of that hardware would definitely would not run Windows 7, I
>> doubt the average person would have any interest in it.
>>
>> At one stage I ran a 'free hardware' page from surplus hardware from the
>> reuse/recycle groups I volunteered for and the number of takers was only
>> a few of the clueless, who couldn't read and mostly did not want to pay
>> postage.
>>
>> I suspect a lot of the ebay listings are just chancers hoping to repeat
>> Kezza Packer's line "You only ever get one Alan Bond" and I've had mine.
>
> Check the "sold listings" box and see what actually sells then.
> Sure there are the fools who want $20 for and IDE cable, but there
> are also people getting decent money for motherboards, CPUs, ISA
> cards etc.
>
> On topic, I sold tens of new-old-stock SCSI 68pin to 50pin
> Centronics adapter cables on Ebay for over $20 each a year or
> two ago. Many went overseas actually, so those buyers paid almost
> another $20 in postage on top of that.
>

I just sold a 5" CRT and power supply for $150 and a single 40 pin DIP
chip for $25 plus postage in just the last 2 days. Both were considered
excellent deals by the buyers.