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IDE to SCSI Converters?
ericdano asks: "Addonics has announced a pair of SCSI solutions, which convert common ATAPI devices and IDE hard drives to high-speed SCSI devices on all Windows, Macintosh, and Linux-based computers: the IDE-SCSI converter ($100) for hard drives and the ATAPI-SCSI converter ($110) for ATAPI-based CDRW, DVD-R/RW, DVD-ROM or CD-ROMs. The company has also announced a high-performance single-channel Ultra160 SCSI PCI host controller ($170) with 160MB/sec. data throughput. How safe are these products?"
Why would I pay >100$ to connect an IDE disk to an expensive controller when I could just use a simple cable and connect it directly to the controller I already have?
Yes, I'm so tired of paying a premium for SCSI drives with half the capacity, etc. I'd much rather pay $100 each to convert my IDE drives to low-quality, high seek-time SCSI drives.
Yeah, right. By putting my old IDE disk in this controller it will be faster? Right.
Not that it couldn't be useful, but this is marketroid speak at its worst...
Nevertheless, when it comes to hard drives, the basic performance of the drive itself will be a limiting factor. I doubt your IDE drive will suddenly get a boost in performance, though it would be neat to see some Bonnie++ results to confirm this.
As for the SCSI controller, does anyone have any experience with these? Its a fair bit cheaper than the equivalent Adaptec model. After putting SCSI in my Linux workstation at work, I'm hooked on it: what's not to like about cutting compile times by 50%? Maybe I could get SCSI at home if this controller is the real deal.
Why do they mention the OS at all? If it doesn't work on all OSes which support SCSI out of the box they must have done something horrible wrong which violates SCSI standards.
at $100 a pop?
I'm not going to bother to convert "just one" drive, I'll want to buy a few, but no way am I spending $400 on that.
$50 is more like it and more within the impulse purchase range for interest users.
I'd pay $100 if each device supported multiple and could control more than one IDE devices (and no it doesn't have to be IDE master/slave, but I wouldn't object)
I'll wait till the price comes down I think, if IDE hasn't moved over to out-of-order command completion by then. If it has then I won't need to bother at all.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Connector:
Ultra160 LVD internal connector,
Ultra160 LVD external connector
Support Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Linux
Dimension (W x D x H) -
1 year warranty
Scary
http://www.memorylabs.net/scsiidconfor.html
You know, if it wasn't for the 100$ adapter price I would be all over this like stank on a monkey.
My system is based on a Tyan Thunder K7. with the SCSI. Booting is done off of an 18Gb 15k rpm Cheetah. And mass storage via a 120Gb Maxtor.
It'd be nice indeed to keeep the IDE channels for burner and dvd drive. While adding copious ammounts of storage into the 29 available slots on the SCSI.
Let's see, 300$ for a 180Gb, 100$ for the Adaptor. 5.2 Terabytes at the cost of 116k.
I don't know where in the hell I'm going to find a case to happily hold 30hd's though.
Though.. 114$ for a 100Gb, plus adaptor, I could reach a terabyte for a mear 2 grand. As an added feature both 1Tb and 5.2Tb are *without* the addition of extra cards.
What I wouldn't do for a job.
Computational Madness in a round package.
their cards work fine for both atapi and ide in one card, they even have cards for 50 and 68 pin, plus lvd
at memorylabs for 74$ us
macena 61.90$ us
works like a charm, and is great for when you don't want to pay the outrageous prices they charge for scsi 40x burners for your older sun system, at least that's why my roommate wanted one
Where is SpamAssassin for Slashdot when I need it?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So they do work on other brands, just not necessarily guaranteed to work.
Maybe I don't completely understand the realm of SCSI, but it seems optical SCSI drives have been left behind ... now the dream system that everybody has on paper can be all SCSI!
We use synetic.net's boxes of ide discs with scsi coming out the back. Work like a dream :)
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
I think it would be pretty smooth if they also offered this IDE-SCSI converter in an SCA version. I'd pick up three just to try them out!
Mentioning an OS is simply to make tech supports life easier. When someone rings up and says they are having problems getting the adaptor to work an old unix box, the tech support department can turn around and say "we don't support that". If someone says they can't get it to work on a generic PC with an adaptec scsi controller, then the tech support bod can at least give them some pointers. "Have you checked the termination" etc.
Bob.
The page doesn't mention anything about tagged command queueing. SCSI drives can receive multiple commands from the controller simultaneously and return the results in whatever order they think is the fastest at that moment. ATA cannot do this, and this is a reason why SCSI usually 'seems' to be faster than ATA. Then there's the issue of latency; the converter would necessarily take some time to convert the commands between SCSI and ATA. Even with ATA/133, I suspect that an ATA drive connected to a SCSI bus using this converter will be much slower than a native SCSI drive. And, at USD$99, it cancels out any savings that you might get from buying an ATA drive over a SCSI one. It'd be better, though, if the converter allowed the user to connect two ATA drives simultaneously, instead of having to use one converter per drive.
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Most scsi drives have a jumper you can set so they start when they receive a scsi start command from the controller. You configure the controller to send scsi starts to the drives in a sensable way. This way your 14 drives don't try to spin up at the same time and blow up your power supply. Remember it takes much less power to keep the platters spinning then it does to start them spinning. Most IDE drives just power up the moment you add power to them. A tower of 14 180 gig drives is impressive but a tower of 14 180 gig drives all trying to spin up at the same time would probably melt most server grade power supplies.
Any ideas how they get around this?
Bob.
Two 80G IDE hard drives : $200. /. : $4
Two ATAPI-SCSI adapters : $200.
A new SCSI controller : $170.
Time spent telling us about it on
Benchmarking the upgraded system and learning you took a 9% performance hit : Priceless.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I am not sure, but I would suggest that the reason they mention the OS at all, is that the people that might actually buy these products might be concerned about what OS it is compatible with.
I can't see too many technically savvy people buying these. The guy that is looking for something to soup up his computer, and acutally asks the guys at Best Buy (that don't work on commission, so feel free to ask questions) for advice.
I'm considering one or the other for next year's revamped home server, where the main considerations are capacity (and ease of adding more and more capacity later) and redundancy, rather than speed. It seems like adding more drives onto a bus that supports a lot of devices (not to mention that they can be external devices), would be much less headache-inducing than trying to add more ATA cards (and trying to fit more drives into a computer case).
But I haven't actually done it yet. Any thoughts?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Be warned!!! These products are INCREDBILY DANGEROUS!!
These converters can cause Spontaneous Incinerations, Plague, Pestilince and Famine, Birth Defects, Sour Milk, Global Thermonuclear Annihilation, Premature Baldness, Tire Sidewall Blowout, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Acid Reflux Disease, Parachute Deployment Malfunction, O-Ring Seal Degredation, Spurious Airbag Inflation, Mass Hallucinations, Alien Invasion, Asteroid Impact, Genetic Mutations, and Loss of Balance to the Force!
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
goes back as far as the ibm 14gxp series, which has to be 6-7 years ago.
look at the sources for the ata controllers in your os
This is what I am waiting for hot-swapable, plug and play Serial ATA.
This has been in the workls for a long time, but there are some actual products coming to market this year.
Tom's has a good story. Serial ATA
The features in brief:
150 MByte/s maximum transfer rate (300/600 MByte/s envisioned for the future)
Hot-plugging capability
Two power saving modes: partial and slumber
Overlapping (commands)
Tagged command queueing
Seven-wire data cable. Connectors measure just 8 mm wide.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
The new line of IBM drives (I thought they got out, but apparently not) offer features like 8mb cache, and tag command queuing. While SCSI will still beat IDE in some way or another, IDE is getting closer.
As everyone else has said though, shoehorning IDE into SCSI won't change much. But, it does have one advantage that I can see. It might be cheeper to get one of these converters for an old SCSI system, like older Macs.
I could just use a simple cable and connect it directly to the controller I already have?
What if I want to use more than two CD drives (DVD-ROM and CD-RW) and two hard drives (swap and /home)? Most motherboards contain only two ATA connectors, each of which can support up to two drives (id 0 and 1).
Will I retire or break 10K?
everybody wants to talk to a guineapig, but no one wants to be one
Tom's Hardware Guide and similar sites get paid by their advertisers to be a guinea pig.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is what I am waiting for hot-swapable, plug and play Serial ATA.
A few years ago, Apple Computer invented the next best thing: a hot-swappable, plug-and-play serial SCSI-protocol connection running at 400 Mbps. It's called a FireWire(tm) brand IEEE 1394 peripheral network.
If you just want hot-swappable ATA, look into PCMCIA and its smaller-form-factor brother CompactFlash.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I have been using similar product for almost a year now.. from Acard Technology they are the one that produce the chipset for Addonics I think. I don't have any problem with it so far.
OK this is slightly OT: Given the low cost of IDE drives today I was wondering if it would make sense to make an adapter that would make a large IDE drive (or array of drives) look like a SCSI DDS DAT drive.
This way, it would be transparent to the server and could use any backup solution that would write to DDS, but it would be faster, cheaper and more reliable* for routine backups. Archival would still go to tape.
(* we seem to have run into a bad spell where even new tapes seem to be getting jammed in our DDS drives/autoloaders)
Anyone have any other suggestions for using IDE drives to back up NT/Exchange servers?
Balam
Grab a cheap PC, stick some 80GB or 120GB drives in it....
Use Windows Explorer or a batch file on your NT/2000 Server....simply copy your server drives to \\mySambaServer\Backup
Their stuff is always priced about twice as high as the competition. I just bought a brand-new LSI Logic 21040 controller, one channel of Ultra160 and one of Ultra for like $120, and it's even a 64-bit PCI card!
It would be much easier than fooling around with SCSI just to get IDE devices working.
The speed of SCSI coupled with the unreliability of IDE. Sounds like a winner.
Seriously, you're not going to be using this in a five-nines server. But this device does have its place on desktops.
You can get a 60GB IDE drive for around a hundred bucks. Add this converter and you've got a 60GB SCSI drive for two hundred. True SCSI drives of that size are around $500.
Sure, you are losing reliability (and maybe some performance) over native SCSI drives, but what you gain is the ability to have more than three drives in a system (the fourth being your CD-ROM in an IDE system) and use cheaper drives on a decent hardware RAID array on a budget not backed by corporate pockets.
Some in this forum will bring up IDE raid adapters... they are almost all crap (Promise cards have given me nothing but trouble -- Adaptec's AAR-2400A is the best I've found).
Now it remains to be seen how reliable this controller is, but if it works well, I think it will be A Good Thing.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
The closest I've come is buying a decent sized case, no motherboard, and putting a bunch of drivers in it, some with 5.25 -> 3.5 adapters on, and buying an internal 50ping to external honda adapter to run an extension cable between the two cases. Looks like two computers under the desk.
Yay me!
If you're thinking of buying one of these cards then you better have a foolproof backup system and make regular (ie, daily) backups.
Here's why.
If you have an IDE hard drive on an IDE controller and the controller fails at a critical juncture then all you have to need to do to get to your data is put the drive in another controller (perhaps in the same machine, perhaps in another one). Similarly if you have a SCSI drive on a SCSI controller.
But if you have an IDE drive attached to an IDE to SCSI converter on a SCSI controller, how do you get to your data quickly if your converter dies on you?
Sure, you can get a new converter card in a couple of days (assuming that you have the cash to buy a replacement, or if Addonics/whoever will courier an advanced warranty replacement to you - and that the cards are still available) but if you need your data now then you're up shit creek without a paddle.
And the worst part is that, by trying to save a few pennies, you're the one who put yourself in this situation.
Granted, there are a few situations where putting an IDE drive on a SCSI controller is a workable solution (the Apple crowd have been doing it for a while with some success) but before you make the commitment shouldn't you seriously examine whether or not it's neccessary and/or safe?
Most new motherboards have can support up to eight IDE devices. Add a third party controller or two - available from Adaptec, Promise, etc -and you can ramp that eight up to 16 or more. And external IDE drives are available too. So what does adding your IDE devices to your SCSI controller bring to the party?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I posted a note on a different topic yesterday about RAID options.
I highly recommend going to www.3ware.com or grab a used card on eBay. The cards use IDE drives but the volumes are perceived by the BIOS and operating system as SCSI devices.
They have fantastic customer support, and write their own Linux drivers (which are constantly committed with stable kernel releases). BSD drivers are also available. I've never used them under Windows.
The cards use a patented network-oriented algorithm for reading and writing to the IDE drives. Their benchmarks are impressive and well-publicized.
Can't say enough nice things about them.
The problems I have seen are that I cannot use my camcorder and a drive on IEEE 1394 simultaneously, and there are cases, possibly related to the first problem, where I have to reboot before I can use a drive again. It doesn't happen often, though, so I haven't even tried to fix it.
In case you are interested, Fire wire direct sells boxes that take multiple drives and gives them a IEEE 1394 connection. FYI: I'm using one of their interface cards and single drive enclosures, but I don't work for them.
"Luncheon meats make the sawdust in your stomach explode."
Why do they mention the OS at all? If it doesn't work on all OSes which support SCSI out of the box they must have done something horrible wrong which violates SCSI standards
.. which according to all the web shops in the UK, requires Win98/XP/2k. Oh, and 100mb of hard-drive space.
hehe, like that Linksys WAP11 Access Point I just bought
Anyone want to search/link to it?
While not a solution today, the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) specification allows for adding Serial ATA devices to a SAS system. They both use the same physical layer, so support will only depend on whether companies support STP (Serial ATA Transport Protocol). Both the HBA and expander (a.k.a. switch) need to support STP for this to work.
I expect we'll see many companies offering scary things like enterprise-class RAID boxes with your option of SAS or SATA drives. As other posters have already observed, ATA isn't reliable enough for this kind of thing and the added maintenance doesn't offset the cost difference for your average RAID installment.
I'm trying to see something new or special about that u160 pci card but I'm failing. There's nothing new about u160 or it being less than $200. See Tekram's line for examples of that. (Tekram's scsi adaptor offerings in general look very cool, as they typically have more features and cost less than the equivalent Adaptec offering. Plus, they supply via their ftp site drivers for all kinds of wacky OSen that other people don't (Solaris on x86, beos, etc).) Heck, the Tekram DC-390D3D card only costs about 30-50 dollars more and is a dual channel part... (Not that you'd need dual channel except for the most demanding workstation usage, or low/mid server construction.)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Now that you can get 512mb of ram for like 3 dollars I'd love to see a box that has a gig of front end cache with a ultrawide scsi connection out the front of one end and a whole bunch of ide connections out the back. So I could go out and buy a whole bunch of cheap IDE drives and have a superfast interface out the front. As for creating of the raid set, I'm not sure what would be a good solution.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Now we're diverging further OT.
I've looked, but never found a way to have NT4's NTBACKUP dump to anything but a tape drive. How do you set that up? (Windows 2000 ntbackup is different, since it's a stripped down version of Backup Exec.)
Personally, I don't like Exchange backup period. Exmerge is really useful, but still doesn't give you the ability to restore to where you were, since you lose single instance file storage when you re-import the PST to Exchange.
And I've heard far more horror stories restoring Exchange stores from "offline" (i.e. file level) backups than "online" (i.e. ntbackup) backups.
BalamToo bad Apple still uses IDE hard drives. FireWire is not nor was it ever intended to be a device interconnect for high speed storage drives.
You will note Serial ATA is 150 MBps, not Mbps. B = bytes. b = bits. Hard drives are much faster than anything an extral bus can provide, thus the reason it is not used to primary hard disks. There are eight bits in a byte remember. Serial ATA is 1200 Mbps while Firewire is 400. Serial ATA also scales to even faster speeds much more easily with 300 megabytes per second around the corner.
And CompactFlash? PCMCIA? What planet are you living on? I use CompactFlash on my PDA. When the guy said Hot Swappable, he wasn't talking about removing a compact flash card, he was talking about swapping out a defective drive in a RAID array...
I also absolutely guarantee that when Serial ATA is fully available, Apple we be amongst the first companies to use it. They have been waiting for this ever since SCSI's demise as a desktop product. They use IDE crap because they have no choice if they want to make a profit. Apple also did not invent Firewire, it was a standard ratified by the IEEE. Thus, the reason it is called IEEE 1394. It is also completely unrelated to SCSI in every way, and not intended to serve as a replacement for it.
Apple people really ARE dumb.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Serial ATA is 1200 Mbps while Firewire is 400
Apparently FireWire is up to 800 mbps now. Can Serial ATA do device-to-device transfers without CPU intervention? If not, cut your bandwidth in half.
Apple also did not invent Firewire, it was a standard ratified by the IEEE. Thus, the reason it is called IEEE 1394.
Apple invented FireWire and submitted it to IEEE. What makes you think they didn't? From the page I linked to:
Will I retire or break 10K?
The good: SCSI command set, ability to use more than 4 per controller per pci slot, can have drives externally using an old SCSI case and thus chain it outside of the main comp. case (finally, I can reuse my old NAS case)
The bad : IDE drives are crappier than ever, so much so they most companies shortened the warranty periods to a year to save money, which in other words means, there were so many warranty returns that they were losing money.
The ugliest: the Price, my budget, and lack of future funds, D'oh
Well, there's also SerialATA which does incorporate some benefits of the SCSI command set (so you can burn, rip, play CS all on the same computer at the same time....awww...the benefits of a SCSI burner). The only downside other than the limitation on the number of drives per controller for SerialATA is that there's no external configuration.....yet. With SCSI, you can have a second case that has drives that would otherwise not fit in the main computer case (just look at the SCSI NAS stuff they sell...though they are hella expensive).
damn....wish money grew on a tree in my backyard.
My bad - I'm thinking of NTbackup on 2000. Been a long while (in IT time) since I used it on NT4 and I can't remember what that version did. In some ways 2000 is worse as exchange becomes tightly integrated with active directory and getting email back after you've lost AD is horror story even if you have a workign exchange backup.
I know about loss of single-instance storage with psts, but after several days of crashed drives, mysteriously unreadable backups, broken tape drives, etc. it is a great relief to just give a pst to each user and say "there's your old mail". that's with tens of users though, obviously with hundreds or more it may be a different story.