The easiest way to add ethernet to the 500 assuming you have the subway would be the norway ethernet module designed to plug onto the subway/highway/algor usb cards.
Another solution is to add zorro slotboard to the 500 side which is not very elegant(you mine as well go find a A2000).
The viper 520 was another solution for the 500,this gave 3x roms,ide for a 2.5" drive and a 020/33? mhz cpu with 8M ram,but these are scarce(i use one in my A1000).The viper would free up the side slot for a ethernet card hack(there are some plans to add a zorro slot to the side of the 500 on aminet).
There were A500 sidecars that could do arcnet iirc but this would eliminate your A530 and who runs arcnet?.The A530 scsi is a much better solution on a low end machine,since the scsi has very little overhead on the cpu and can dma.This makes much more sense on a low powered machine that needs the cpu for other stuff(i.e. tcp/ip u want to run).
scsi is superior in many ways,since it allows you to add many devices, is low cpu usage,and termination isn't a hassle in most cases,its very simple,especially on 50 pin scsi.Sadly,scsi seems to be the most misunderstood thing there is.In most cases you can jumper the drives on each end for passive termination,although active terminators are the best way.adding ide to a slow machine really doesn't make much sense. If you can jumper a ide drive master slave,surely you can jumper a scsi drive to terminated it and set the ID.
Another thing mentioned by some was scsi drives are old,slow,and run hot. I personally run IBM 10,000rpm 36gig in my 4000 that i'm typing this on,they are very quiet and do not run scorching hot like the seagates,so you don't have to stick with OLD drives.Ebay usually has quite a selection of cheap,newer scsi drives,there is no reason u can't use the 80pin 9 gig+ drives on amiga with 80->50pin adapter,they work fine on any amiga and i have picked them up new 9 gig ibm drives for $15!. Someone also mentioned newer ide's have bigger buffers which is not really true,scsi drives have had 16M buffers for many years,and up to 15K rpm drives,Ide is just now catching up.Scsi drives were also used in server duty applications and their MTBF(mean time before failure) was considerably longer than most IDE.Price is still a big difference between ide/scsi though scsi has gotten cheaper but not near ide..Another solution to get a ide CF card into the GVP is a Acard scsi-IDE adapter($$$) which would be great for low power usage.
I personally would only use scsi that is off the accelerator,this is a fast 32bit dma.Zorro 2 cards,be it scsi or ide are inherantly slow since they run off the 16 bit zorro2 bus,and this may not matter much when the cpu is 68000,but is slow/bad when its 68020+ or in zorro3 machines.
In the case of the A4000 ide,its slow and cpu intensive as pointed out,it's always amazed me to see people use this instead of the fast scsi on their warpengine,cyberstorm MK1,2,3/csppc they have installed.hehe
I have also used scsi->pcmcia card readers long before usb solutions were available on amiga,but these appear to only work as "drives" reading media cards and cannot be used to add pcmcia ethernet cards and such,i would imagine the same with the ide solutions.i wonder if a driver could be made to use them for ethernet?
The usb->ethernet adapters would be useable if there were drivers.
About the A1000 mentioned earlier,i have managed to put a viper 520cd in it,use it for a drive and ram,and 3x roms,and hack a zorro adapter from a IVS trumpcard 500 to the siee with a Xsurf ethernet card.The A1000 will surf the internet without missing a beat and its quite amazing something engineered in 1986 or so will adopt to later hardware.
Mechy
