• The Return of SCSI

    From Internetado@21:1/5 to All on Thu Mar 3 16:11:59 2022
    There was a time when high-performance disk drives used SCSI - the
    Small Computer System Interface - and everything else was kid stuff.
    Now, advanced forms of SCSI are still around but there are other high-performing disk interfaces, too. But some old gear really loves
    their classic SCSI ports, and [Adrian] decided to try hooking some of
    them up to some modern computers. You can see how he did in the video
    below.

    The key to the attempt is a USB to SCSI adapter which was unusual but
    not unheard of, and [Adrian] came across one from 1999. Of course, you
    have to wonder if a modern computer will support the device or will be
    able to load the drivers from the old CD.

    One of the problems with these adapters is that SCSI was a
    high-performance bus for its day, and the corresponding USB speed was
    not so much. Parallel SCSI used differential signaling and could reach
    up to 320 MB/s. Ordinary USB weighs in at 1.5 MB/s. USB 2 did a little
    better, but it would take USB 3 to eclipse the old SCSI data rate. Of
    course, SCSI went serial like USB and modern serial-attached SCSI can
    blow the doors off even the fastest USB devices.

    We doubt you really need to use a SCSI device as an everyday thing, but
    you might want to or need to read one that shows up. Plus it is just a
    really interesting look into the way things were. Finding the drivers
    were, as you';d expect, a real pain. Turns out, he probably didn';t
    need to bother as Windows knows how to treat it as a storage device but
    he didn';t figure that out right away.

    Android didn';t seem to work as well, although that may have been
    because the phone didn';t recognize the disk format.

    https://hackaday.com/2022/03/02/return-of-scsi/

    --
    Internetado
    Brasil <- Portugal

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  • From Michael =?ISO-8859-1?Q?B=E4uerle?=@21:1/5 to Internetado on Fri Mar 4 10:12:59 2022
    Internetado wrote:

    [USB to parallel SCSI host adapter] https://hackaday.com/2022/03/02/return-of-scsi/

    USB ist only one option to attach a parallel SCSI bus to a modern
    machine. There are also PCIe cards like this one: <https://adaptec.com/zh-cn/products/scsi/asc-29320lpe/faqs.html> <https://storage.microsemi.com/en-us/support/scsi/u320/asc-29320lpe/_docs/scsi_installation_and_user_guide_02_07_pdf.htm>
    According to the flyer from the FAQ this card contains an AIC-3860
    bridge that should support two bus segments with different modes
    (SE devices on one segment will not switch the transceivers of all
    LVD/SE devices on the other segment to SE mode).

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