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?"

Comments

A sensible use senario ...

[Boiotos]

of the ATAPI/IDE to SCSI converter might be when one a) already has a SCSI controller and b) wants to add many additional ATAPI devices to the machine. A SCSI chain can comprise many more devices than your usual 2 and 2 on an IDE controller. Furthermore, one might hope that the SCSI converter would keep the ATAPI/IDE device nicely saturated regardless of system activity. Perhaps a CD copying station would benefit from this arrangement.

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.

Acard has these and I got mine alot cheaper

[eht]

acard

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

Tagged command queueing and latency

[red_dragon]

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.