Turn Your Pi Zero Into A SCSI Emulator!
I’ve recently been getting back into playing around with retro computers. One of the popular ways to connect hard drives, CD-ROMs, scanners, and just about any peripheral before USB came around was SCSI (pronounced “scuzzy”). Finding working SCSI devices can be difficult and very expensive! However, this awesome Pi Zero Hat from seller LandoGriffin can emulate any type of removable/fixed storage device. The RaSCSI is capable of emulating multiple devices simultaneously, and offers an easy to use interface for inserting and ejecting devices on the bus.
While devices like SD2IDE are popular for getting files to and from older machines, they can be slow and sometimes unreliable. SCSI is very well supported by pretty much all operating systems from the late 1980s all the way to the present day, and it offers throughput ranging from 40-320MBit/s for the original SCSI standard, all the way into the GBit/s for some later updated versions. Also, many laptops from that time period had SCSI built in, meaning no additional devices need to be added or configured.
A Pi Zero with an external powered USB hard drive and this hat could add huge amounts of storage space to all sorts of vintage machines. If you’re a collector like me, a device like this is super handy to have on hand. There are also all sorts of samplers and synthesizers that used SCSI for external storage, and this device can breathe new life into these aging pieces of audio gear.
The seller also offers the same device in a full-size version for the full-size Raspberry Pis. This has the same DE25 connector as well as a ribbon-cable connector for installing inside a PC that supports it. It is also possible to add a daisy-chain connector so that other SCSI devices can share the bus.