DEC RWZ01
Overview
Peripheral Vision Tech LTD (PV) (Reading UK), have developed a Solid state Disk drive with emulation capability aimed at Legacy systems. This is a SCSI Disk drive with no moving parts. Data is stored on an industry standard industrial strength Compact Flash (CF) card, which can be easily removed, and treated as a replacement for the disk cartridge. The CF card can then be plugged into a Windows PC and the data archived. It has a standard SCSI2 interface and can be configured to replace those hard-to-find Magneto Optical
disk drives used in legacy systems.
When connected to a SCSI Host, the Host sees the SCSICFDisk as a regular Floppy Disk drive. It is a single printed circuit board (PCB) controller, that bridges the CF card to a SCSI bus. When attached to a host computer’s SCSI bus, the SCSICFDisk device appears as a SCSI target (Magneto Optical
). The card accepts 5 volt power, and SCSI signals via standard connectors.
Features
- SCSI solid state disk that uses an industry strength standard Compact Flash (CF) Card as its storage.
- Typically 3.5” form factor. However various form factors are available so that the product is a mechanical match for the original drive.
- No Host software or hardware modifications are necessary. Plug & Play operation.
- The original drive can simply be removed and replaced by the SCSICFDisk. Cable connectivity is the same.
- Low Power, 5V only-- less than 400Ma. Power is supplied via the same standard disk power connector.
- Standard 50 pin SCSI2 interface. SCSI2 transfer rates of (up to) 10 Mbytes/sec.
- Disk capacities only limited by current CF cards (currently 256 GB).
- No moving parts. Rugged. Overcomes the reliability problems of aging disk drives.
- Vastly improved reliability and MTBF over the original drive.
- The SCSI SCSICFDisk can be configured to emulate & replace those unreliable (or hard to repair) SCSI Magneto Optical disk drives for legacy systems.
- Optional HVD interface via a plug-in daughter card.
- Allows backup data to be stored on small and rugged media.
- Removable low-cost CF card can be treated as a single disk media.
- Can be dual-ported so that two or more Hosts can share the unit.
- Write Protect available either via a front panel switch or via the CF cards that come with integral Write-protect switches.
- Existing Magneto Optical disk media can be copied to CF cards (and then to a PC) allowing future-proofing of existing backup data.
- PV aim the product as a low-cost way to give extra life for Legacy Hosts which would otherwise need to use unreliable second-hand drives.
