While I may not sell BlueSCSI and ZuluSCSI products anymore, I still use them. How could I not? I have a mountain of vintage Macs and a dwindling number of functional mechanical SCSI hard drives, so my demand for SCSI emulators seems never ending.

In my opinion, there is nothing more valuable than an external SCSI drive. I think back to my days as a Mac tech in the mid 90s, and my external hard drive was the most important tool in my repair kit (perhaps a close second to my trusty T15 Torx driver). I would rock up to a client’s office, plug my external drive into their sick Mac, boot from the external with the old Shift-Option-Command-Delete key combination, then run a suite of diagnostics on their internal drive. In a worst case scenario, I would copy the entire contents of their drive to mine (most of them only had 40 or 80 Megabyte drives), erase the internal drive and then copy the contents back.

External drives are still just as useful today, but we now have the added convenience of almost unlimited storage and the tiny form factor of these new external SCSI emulators.

If you can’t be bothered watching the videos, the ZuluSCSI is in front, but only slightly. Faster seek times, an incredibly convenient form factor, and while it might be $10 more than the BlueSCSI, the price is still very attractive. Having said that, the open source nature of the BlueSCSI means you can build your own for a fraction of the price if you are motivated enough to do so.

While this might be my opinion right at this moment, things move pretty fast in the world of SCSI emulators, and with the RP2350 revisions right around the corner, my opinion could change very soon.