I have a number of internal 8-bit SCSI-1 drives that I'd like to archive for historical purposes. These are all the old NeXT Cubes and NeXTStations (monochrome and color) that were used by id Software to create DOOM and Quake. I'd like to donate the machines somewhere they can do some good, but John Carmack had me promise more than a decade ago that I'd wipe the drives if I ever passed them along, and I'd hate to lose any priceless data that's on them.
In theory, I realize SCSI is backwards compatible, and so I may just be able to plug it into an appropriate cable & modern SCSI card…
But I suspect that it's not quite that simple, and further, it's not obvious what type of cable or adapter I would need and where to acquire one.
If I successfully do extract the data, I'll ping John and see if it might be ok to release the disk images to the public. It's his data, so it'll be his call. id has open-sourced much of their code, so there might not be anything useful here, but the geek in me would hate to lose it if there is. 🙂
Best Answer
Old NeXT hardware. SWOON!
Getting a SCSI2 -> SCSI 1 adapter should be trivial. There were both internal and external varieties. Google is your friend. For some reason I thought the "newer" slabs should be SCSI2 but it's been a long time.
You still have to terminate the SCSI chain. Keep to addresses 0-7.
Further just Googling for "scsi-2 pci card" comes up with hits. An Adaptec card for instance should still have good working SCSI support on linux. Looks like one can be had for ~$20.
Here's the thing tho. How the heck are you going to read the file system using anything BUT NeXTSTEP? I suppose you might be able to boot an old NeXTSTEP/OpenStep Intel cd, and ftp/scp/rsync over the files you're looking to save after you've mounted the drive. The trick would probably be finding an Adaptec card which OpenStep supported.
Good luck!