Scsi to cf adapter

[kirk_m]

Has anyone bought one of these yet and tried it out?

I have the SCSI2SD (both 6 and 5) and they're OK, but, the fastest I can get out of them is 1.8mb/sec, even on my Blizzard 2060's SCSI controller.

[kirk_m]

I have one and wish I had another, it works great. I plugged it in to the GVP 68040 card scsi to cf and bingo. I had already built the cf card on a scsi to IDE converter card I have. Every thing works,I don,t have a tool to measure transfer rates.

Sysinfo has a rough estimate for speed, if you have that installed, in the drives section.

[kirk_m]

Can someone post a pic of this mystical Mechware card reader?

[kirk_m]

Not mystical at all, i sold them here for 3-4 years:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130924003304/http://a4000t.com:80/store/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=68

I said mystical...not mythical   I've never seen one, and those who have them speak well of them, but, I had never seen one.  Wish you were still selling miggy stuff....

[kirk_m]

So, has anyone bought and tried one out yet?

[kirk_m]

I asked the seller and it measures 122mm x 79mm, so, yes, it is wider than the 3.5" bay.

[kirk_m]

So, I bought one to try on my CS MK2 w/ CyberScsi module on my A4000.  No Joy.  I took the CF card that I am booting the A4000 from (on a Fast ATA MK VII), and put it in the SCSI-CF adapter.  Set the terminator on and the SCSI ID via its jumpers.  Tried all three possible IDs that it offers, turned termination on and off, set term power on and off, and, nothing but the Kickstart screen appears, asking for a disk.  The card's LEDs illuminate, indicating it's getting power, and the read/write LED on the card will flicker for a second or two, indicating the SCSI module is trying to access it, but, it won't boot.  I've tried 4,16,32 GB Sandisk CFs and a 4GB Kingston, all of which are system drives on other Amigas I own, but, nothing boots.  

If I should boot the A4000 from the Fast ATA, while having a CF card on the SCSI-CF adapter card, I can open up HDToolbox in 3.9.  I can indeed select it, it shows up as SCSI-IDE-Bridge, or something similar, but, when I click on it to view the partition tables on the CF card, I get an error stating that HDToolbox cannot be used on this type of drive (or something similar to what one gets if you try to select a SCSI CDROM drive with HDtoolbox).

[kirk_m]

I have one and wish I had another, it works great. I plugged it in to the GVP 68040 card scsi to cf and bingo. I had already built the cf card on a scsi to IDE converter card I have. Every thing works,I don,t have a tool to measure transfer rates.

Did you have to do anything in particular to get the card to work?

[kirk_m]

After a few more CF card tries and some back and forth with the seller, I could only get a 10+ year old Hitachi 32 MB card to work.  The seller says that he has had problems with the adapter being picky about CF cards and, usually only working with smaller cards.  He offered a return, which I will be taking him up on.  He called CF an outdated technology fraught with problems, and said he will be redesigning the card in the near future to use SD cards.  Also, instead of needing to write an EEPROM to update or change the firmware, via an eeprom programmer, he will be implementing direct control via a micro-usb to the card, much like the SCSI2SD card, for firmware updates.  I wanted to like this card, but, it just doesn't work well in its current form for a Amigas.  Speed was between 3 & 3.5mb/sec on a CyberScsi module on my CSMK2 060/Amiga 4000.