The Return of SCSI

[Internetado]

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

[Michael Bäuerle]

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).