IDE/SCSI Flash Drives

A year or so ago I looked them up, reeeeaaaaly expensive.

Flash to ATA ($25?), then ATA to SCSI($10-50 -eBay). Eazy peazy! I'm specifically thinking of the Flash-to-laptop-ATA type, and attached to an adapter like used with the old Apple 1GB PowerBook SCSI drives. Of course, it'd be just as easy to use an adapter to go from Flash to 3.5" ATA, then use a currently available ATA-to-SCSI bridge, though that last is more expensive (~$75 or so.)

Well, either route is not exactly cheap though neither is super-expensive.

dan k

I assume you are referring to the Compact Flash card adapters? If so, this might be a great solution for a Mac Plus or other old Mac that doesn't use much HD space (assuming no special drivers are needed). This will definitely keep them quiet! But the cost of those flash cards for anything close to supporting a modern Mac's storage needs would definitely be prohibitive (for me). Also, there are write limitations to those flash cards. So modern systems using them for scratch disks and the like, could easily wear them out in a matter of hours. I presume the flash drives, built for this purpose, take that into consideration and have a much higher re-write tolerance. I've also read that the transfer rate for copying and back-up is quite slow (which increases with storage size), but for general data access it would be suffcient -- certainly a lot faster than a floppy based system (and no more disk swapping)! Ahhh the price of peace and quiet -- who new it would be so high?

just putting an old 2.5" PB drive in there, quiet, low power, little heat. Be alot cheaper and easier than messing about with the ATA-to-SCSI conversion. 40, 80, even 160MB drives are dirt cheap, and any would be plenty of storage for a Plus. Hmmm, an internal HD, and use the external port for a SCSI-to-enet adapter . . . it'd be a thoroughly modern, web-ready Plus!

dan k

No hard drive is quiet. You got cheaper right, but you always give up something -- you get what you pay for as they say. I have NEVER heard a hard drive that didn't make noise no matter how small. Every PowerBook drive I've ever had which may have started out reasonably quiet (but not silent by any means) eventually cranked up the decibels as they aged. Some with some really nasty frequencies that gave me headaches -- and it's not always the volume, just the CONSTANT ambience of the spinning. I went round and round with Apple on this once, even to the point where I bought a sound meter to take measurements. After I proved to them how noisy one of the drives was they replaced it -- twice! The last one eventually went bad after the Apple Care Warranty expired. I have numerous old PB 2.5" HD's sitting around and they are noisy as all get-out! I even put one inside a Plus case to see if that dampened it at all and it didn't -- too many vents! A little pricier, but the flash drive is for me -- eventually! Besides, the ATA-SCSI conversion is nothing, eazy peazy!

can boot off PC Card bay Cards
I got a PB 190 to boot off of a 128MB CF Card. I threw a system on it and had no HD in it

Mac128: While it is true that there is no ***completly silent*** HD out there, i just put a Seagate 5400rpm 100Gig HD in my 'book, and it is DEAD silent!

... not to be negative, but the day will come ... and it will creep into your life so transparently that you may not notice ...

As far as that PB compact flash, that's exactly what DK suggested with the flash to ATA adapter. Instead of a more expensive PCMCIA bay, it's the CF card reader portion wired to an ATA interface. People have been using the PC Card method for years to some success. Keep in mind that a CF card only has a couple hundred thousand writes during its life, which seems like a lot until you start surfing the web or using an application that writes a lot of temp files to disk.

Of course, the best way to do it might be to set up a RAM disk that copies the contents of the flash card onto it when you start up and saves the RAM disk back to the flash only when you shut down. As long as you could gurantee that documents and information you worked on were saved to the CF card as you go, then it would be safe enough to withstand the loss of RAM during a crash.

Now you can find drives of less than 1 GB for moderately sane prices. Might be a great deal for running an older PowerBook, especially a flash SCSI in an old 68k. I am starting to see 1 GB - 2 GB drives in the hundred dollar range at times, which IMO is the minimum useful for modern stuff. For example, my 1400c has about 7 GB of just *text files* alone.

On the crazy end of the spectrum, I was looking for a 10 GB+ SCSI drive which companies were asking between 5k and 10k$ for! I nearly fell out of my chair! Even these smaller drives which are now more available were much more expensive a few years ago. On the bright side, there is not much of a future for rotational media, so solid-state will get much less expensive.