SASI device <-> PC ?

[Scott Stevens]

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005 16:30:23 +0000
Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> 
> Has anyone here successfully interfaced a SASI device to a PC at the
> hardware level?
> 
> I've got a few classic systems which use SASI (or not-quite-SCSI)
> controllers to talk to SASI-ST506 bridge boards and from there to
> ST506 type drives.
> 
> As has been documented many times in the past here, an ST506 drive has
> a pretty tight relationship with its controller, and so hooking up the
> drive to a different controller (say MFM controller in a PC) causes
> all sorts of problems when it comes to backup.
> 
> Hence driving the SASI side of things (and preserving the drive/bridge
> board relationship) would seem like a sensible move when it came to
> backing up data. In theory data could then be restored to a
> replacement drive if/when the original dies via the same method.
> 
> Presumably inventing a simple SASI board to hang off a PC parallel
> port(say) is a lot easier than mucking around with the equivalent for
> floppy drives - or is the data rate still likely too low to cause
> timeout problems within the bridge board's firmware?
> 
Years ago, and I mean YEARS ago, I had a SASI card for the ISA bus on a
PC that a friend had given me.  I never had a use for it and just 'had'
it for a time.  This was in the mid 80's.