ZuluSCSI is a solid-state direct replacement for a physical SCSI drive. Since it doesn’t rely on mechanical media, it’s an excellent choice for retro computers — no moving parts means silent, cool operation, and nothing that can fail the way a thirty-year-old disk can.
Performance
Based on my own informal benchmarking, I’ve found ZuluSCSI to be sufficiently fast for older computers. In side-by-side comparisons with real SCSI-2 hard disks, there’s little difference in real-world performance. The ZuluSCSI RP2040 supports read speeds up to 10 MB/s and write speeds up to 6 MB/s, which is well within the range of a period SCSI-2 controller.
SD card storage
An added benefit of ZuluSCSI is that disk images are stored as regular files on an exFAT-formatted SD card. This makes it easy to back up images on a modern computer and even share them. Drag-and-drop works the way you’d expect: copy an image file onto the card, put the card back in the ZuluSCSI, and boot.
Multiple SCSI targets per board
A single ZuluSCSI board can host multiple SCSI targets. This means you can load a CD image of an OS installation CD and a blank disk image to install the OS onto, without needing a physical CD-ROM drive. Handy when you’re doing a clean install and don’t want to track down a working SCSI optical drive.
Mounting on Sun computers
On my Sun computers I place the Zulu board in the floppy bay. This keeps the SD card accessible from the front of the machine, which makes it trivial to pop the card out, back up the machine, and add or swap disk and CD images without opening the chassis.
Where to buy
ZuluSCSI boards are reasonably priced and have proven to be very stable. They’re available from Rabbit Hole Computing:
Vendor: rabbitholecomputing.com