Macintosh Storage Replacement Projects

Introduction​

Below are a list of projects that can help you replace a dead or dying drive on your vintage Mac.
Projects are listed alphabetically so be sure to read through them all. Any choice is a great choice!

BlueSCSI​

Site: https://scsi.blue
License: CC-Non-Commercial Hardware, GPLv3 Software
Variants:
- F1 (stm32f1 based) - 50 Pin, DB25, PowerBook
- F4 (stm32f4 based) - 50 Pin, PowerBook
Description:
BlueSCSI & ArdSCSino are hardware that reproduces SCSI devices (hard disks) with an Arduino STM32F103C (aka Blue Pill.)
Key Features:

• Simple to use, drag an image file onto an SD Card
• Simple to source parts and assemble yourself

Why Choose this?
BlueSCSI is simple, cheap, and no frills solution. If you have a Vintage Mac with a SCSI port and need a Drive, this is a good solution.

FloppyEMU​

Site: https://www.bigmessowires.com/floppy-emu/
License: Closed
Description:
Floppy Emu is a floppy and hard disk emulator for classic Apple II, Macintosh, and Lisa computers. It uses an SD memory card and custom hardware to mimic an Apple floppy disk and drive, or an Apple hard drive. The Emu behaves exactly like a real disk drive, requiring no special software or drivers.
Key Features:

• Emulates HD-20 Disk drives via floppy port.
  • 512k, Plus, SE, Classic, Classic II, Portable, IIci, IIsi, LC1.
  • The SE/30, IIcx and IIx need a ROM-inator II for HD-20 support.
• Also emulates 400k, 800k, 1.4mb floppy disks

Why Choose this?
FloppyEMU has many features and allows you to boot many older macs via HD-20 floppy interface. If you also have Apple II or Lisa computers then this can be good solution.

MacSD​

Site: http://macsd.com/
License: Closed
Description:
MacSD is a hard drive and CD-ROM drive emulator designed for classic Macs
Key Features:

• CD Audio
• Classic App to transfer files from the SD to image
• Allows for use of "Drive" and "Partition" based images
• Mount multiple images to one device

Why Choose this?
If you have a vintage Mac and CD audio is important along with the image and file management features this would be a good choice.

RaSCSI​

Site: https://rascsi.com
License: Open - MIT hardware & Software
Description:
RaSCSI is a virtual SCSI device emulator that runs on a Raspberry Pi. It is a two piece solution, with a hardware and software component. RaSCSI can emulate multiple SCSI devices concurrently, provides a control interface to attach / detach drives, as well as insert and eject removable media. Simply connect the RaSCSI interface board to your system, launch the RaSCSI software on the Raspberry Pi, and the virtual devices will be accessible as physical SCSI devices!
Key Features:

• Emulates HD, CD, MO drives.
• DaynaPort SCSI Ethernet emulation
• Can be controlled via Web and Android App control
• Wide variety of support and preset drive types

Why Choose this?
If you want to get your vintage mac online and have a web interface to manage drives, choose this.

SCSI2SD v5 & v6​

Site: http://www.codesrc.com/mediawiki/index.php/SCSI2SD
License: Software Open GPL, Hardware Closed
- Note: v4.2 was provided as an open hardware solution.
Variants:
- PowerBook, DB25, and 50 pin
Key Features:

• Wide support for many computers.
• SCSI-2 Support (v6)

Why Choose this?
If you need a stable and widely supported device choose this.

 

[trag]

Not a project, but an Acard SCSI-IDE adapter and an IDE drive work pretty well for a lot of things. The 7720 (narrow interface) used to be available for less than $50, but now days the whole line of adapters are priced very high -- more than $200 for new devices. Sigh.

The 7722 is available on Ebay for less than $30 but only supports optical drives. It can be converted to a 7726, which supports hard drives by removing the flash chip and reprogramming it with the 7726 1.73Q firmware.

The only gotcha with the 7722 conversion is that sometimes sellers send revision 1.5 and sometimes they send revision 1.8.

Revision 1.5 has a PLCC flash chip and reprogramming/conversion is straight forward.

Revision 1.8 has a TSOP flash chip, which shouldn't be a problem provided you have TSOP adapters for your chip programmer, but it's a 16 bit wide TSOP flash chip.

On the Rev. 1.8 only the low byte of the flash is connected. So when programming the replacement firmware, one must insert an empty byte between every byte of the firmware, to fill out the 16 bit flash properly.