MacSD SCSI adapter
Saturday, 7 May 2022
My Macintosh SE had the original 20MB hard drive still full of software, and although it was painfully slow (too much bloat, maybe?) I didn’t want to lose anything on it. That meant I needed to get a new hard drive that I could play around with.
Since the Macintosh SE uses SCSI, I wanted to get a SCSI to flash memory card adapter, of which several exist. There is the SCSI2SD, the open-source BlueSCSI, and a newer one called MacSD.
As far as I can tell, MacSD only popped online late 2020. Maybe it was a pandemic project? So the number of people using it is relatively small, but there were a couple key things that made me buy it over the others.
It features a lot of flexibility in how you manage your images. You can edit the macsd.ini file to define a “CD changer” with multiple CD images — just eject to go to the next CD. And you can load a bunch of assorted floppy images in various formats into a “composite” device.
The other nifty feature is MacSD Commander, which lets you copy files from the SD Card’s FAT32 partition directly into System 6/7. You just copy files straight onto the SD card from your modern Windows/Linux/Mac computer and then transfer them on your classic Mac.
I did run into some bugs but the creator was very responsive, worked with me to fix them, and even gave me some credit online 🙂
MacSD is not an open-source product, but it might be the right one for your classic SCSI-equipped computer!