If you want to retain as much of the hardware as possible, then a replacement MFM would be the way to go, but as others have indicated, these drives are very difficult to get hold of in working condition.
The next closest thing would be to ditch the Adaptec controller and use a 3.5" SCSI HDD instead. But you need to make sure you get one that supports 256 byte sectors, and that parity checking can be disabled. Such 50 pin drives are available, but can be quite expensive. The alternative would be to use an 80 pin drive, but you then need an 80 to 50 pin adaptor and termination. I'm currently developing a board that will provide that:
viewtopic.php?p=450375#p450375
If that's too expensive, the next solution is probably BlueSCSI which emulates a SCSI drive. That will plug into the host adaptor in exactly the same way as a 50 pin SCSI drive. I've tested this, and it works fine with my host adaptor board.
If that all still sounds to complicated or expensive, and if you're not worried about using the existing host adaptor, then BeebSCSI / Pi1MHz is probably the way to go. That will emulate the host adaptor, Adaptec SCSI controller and MFM HDD. Pi1MHz also emulates M5000 and implements RAM disc and MMFS, so is a very versitile solution.
As others have pointed out, there are also IDE solutions available, but you need a patched version of ADFS (which is readily available) for those to work.
The next closest thing would be to ditch the Adaptec controller and use a 3.5" SCSI HDD instead. But you need to make sure you get one that supports 256 byte sectors, and that parity checking can be disabled. Such 50 pin drives are available, but can be quite expensive. The alternative would be to use an 80 pin drive, but you then need an 80 to 50 pin adaptor and termination. I'm currently developing a board that will provide that:
viewtopic.php?p=450375#p450375
If that's too expensive, the next solution is probably BlueSCSI which emulates a SCSI drive. That will plug into the host adaptor in exactly the same way as a 50 pin SCSI drive. I've tested this, and it works fine with my host adaptor board.
If that all still sounds to complicated or expensive, and if you're not worried about using the existing host adaptor, then BeebSCSI / Pi1MHz is probably the way to go. That will emulate the host adaptor, Adaptec SCSI controller and MFM HDD. Pi1MHz also emulates M5000 and implements RAM disc and MMFS, so is a very versitile solution.
As others have pointed out, there are also IDE solutions available, but you need a patched version of ADFS (which is readily available) for those to work.
Statistics: Posted by KenLowe — Thu Mar 13, 2025 9:49 am