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IDE/ATAPI to SCSI Converters Reviewed
Anonymous Coward writes "Seems that someone has finally come out with IDE/ATAPI to SCSI converters to bridge the gap between the high-cost SCSI world and the low-cost IDE world. Addonics is the company and LinuxHardware.org has a full review of these two devices. The review does a good job of laying out installation and performance. These are just what I've been looking for and although a little pricey, they seem to do the job."
I've used these and I can't help fealing that they are a bit over priced. Sure you can get a 120gig SCSI drive for way cheaper then if you got a pure SCSI solution. However you lose the benifits of SCSI in the process (like tag queu reordering). Bottom line is that for most solutions the eftra 100-200$ for these adaptors is close if not more then the price diference between SCSI and IDE to start with. Unless you have an existing device that you wish to use (like putting an IDE CD-RW into an Ultra Sparc station) these things just don't seem worth it.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Now I won't have to use that cheapo zip zoom card. Cause, we are sure that this tech will have fewer bugs than any old cheap scsi card.
I have a SCSI scanner that I'd like to hook up to my IDE only machine. Hopefully these devices are not responsible for their server being unavailable!
\/\/oobie
IDE to SCSI Converters?
2 42257&mode=thread&tid=137
Posted by Cliff on 04:55 AM October 3rd, 2002 from the how-well-do-they-work dept.
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?"
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/10/03/0
- what is the definition of simultanagnosia?! I've been meaning to look it up!
From this?
I saw one of these at Microcenter last week. But nah, I've got my old scsi card from years back that works just great, with my $500 9gig scsi drive. =) haha. Memories.
They now have Firewire to ATAPI converters!
This is so lame. Blackfire and Acard have been making these thing for years.
You mean now I can buy low quality IDE devices and pay losts of money to hook them up to my scsi system? Where do I sign up?
So instead of buying SCSI drives, you save money by getting cheaper, faster, but less dependable IDE drives and then shell out the price difference to adapt it to your slower SCSI bus. This seems like the worst of both worlds to me. Am I missing something?
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
The performance of the IDE drives are almost the same as their SCSI counterparts. Amazing!
IDE to SCSI converter = US$99, ATAPI to SCSI converter = US$109. Both are MSRP.
IMHO, that's a really good bargain. This also proves that the real bottleneck in the IDE drives is actually that for one IDE bus, only one device can be active at a time.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Save your money for neon lights, or plexiglass, or whatever other case mod you were going to blow money on.
I cannot tell you all how many times I have come across this issue. I have seen some ISA adapters that cost upwards of several thousand dollars. Has anyone seen anything better and cheaper?
For the price of an IDE/ATAPI device plus converters, you could get full blown SCSI devices, and not deal with the added parts to break down.
Interesting. Yes.
Practical. Not so sure.
Have you painted a shed today?
You'll probably find this pretty easily but just for a quick link: http://www.addonics.com/news/media/2002/100402sili convalley-internet-com.asp
...with integrated Babelfish-like translation on the chip so that all my data is written to a SCSI drive in Engrish.
I had something on my old Amiga 1200 that converted internal IDE port to SCSI, so I was able to use the old SCSI drive from my A500. It was actually pretty cheap, as in less than the price of larger IDE drive (but then, the A1200 used laptop IDE drives and not the normal one.)
My karma is in a nose dive
It seems to me (I may be wrong) that the only market for something like this would be for some backwards compatibility and perhaps the odd person that just wants a 10,000 RPM drive.
If someone buys a SCSI drive, chances are they have a SCSI connector. I don't know why anyone would purchase a SCSI drive when they had IDE. IDE is just as fast now, plus much less expensive. So who is this really directed at?
The only logical group I can honestly think of would be people that have SCSI on one machine but just want to switch the drive over to another one without SCSI. But why do that? For the price of $109 for the connector you could just buy another IDE hard drive.
Once again, the only reason why someone would need this is if they are super hardcore and wanted a 10,000 RPM SCSI drive and just wanted to interface it with IDE since those (to my knowledge) are not available yet. However, people with that kind of money probably already have motherboards that support SCSI. That's a fairly narrow audience.
I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm trying to get some Slashdot people to tell me why this is a useful thing. Any thoughts?
To make a pun demonstrates the highest understanding of a language
ACard have been making a really cool range of SCSI to IDE products for several years now called SCSIDE. They work very well too, especially the mirroring and interface bridge stuff I've had my hands on :)
:)
For more info take a look here
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
I didn't know that the IDE cable, and interface is what "slowed" IDE hard drives down?
Can an adapter and SCSI cabling really make my Maxtor 5400RPM go 160MB/second?
For those not familiar, or trying to respond to others in this forum and don't know what to say: =)
IDE vs. SCSI article at PcMech.
SCSI & IDE Overview Good, informative, classroom materials for a university.
IDE to SCSI Adaptor Review of the ACard ARS-2000FW
ACARD Tech. - Makes SCSI to IDE converters.
These things have been around for years! I've had them for 2.5" SCSI notebooks in SparcBooks. There are pleny of SCSI-IDE bridges over at dirtcheap drives for like $50-$70 depending on whether you want wide or narrow scsi. $100 is too much.
And I've used these to hook up a bunch of 160GB IDE drives together to make a nice big huge raid array. They're great - only if you hook'em up to big drives where SCSI would be too expensive or to hook up DVD or CDRW's to Scsi only machines such as SUNs.
First, someone posts a story (which gets ACCEPTED?) about these converters from Addonics, then an AC (!) posts another story about these converters (again, ACCEPTED - wtf?). Looks like Addonics is trolling.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Just for kicks, I looked up two Seagate hard drives on Pricewatch....I selected the ST336938LW (Ultra160) and ST340016A (ATA100), as both are 40 gig (well, 37 for the SCSI one) with comparable features (~9 ms access times, 7200 RPM). The priced out at $218 for SCSI and $80 for the ATA drive. I can't believe that the controller card costs $140, especially given that I could buy an adapter card for $100 (and still let the add-on card maker make a profit). What exactly is the difference here? It seems like the SCSI drive would have higher quality, although I can't seem to find MTBF numbers for the drives. Anyone who is more knowledgable want to expand on this?
I just contacted Addonics to get a returned materials authorization (RMA) number for my IDE to SCSI adaptor, since it would not work.
/proc/scsi/scsi), but any attempt to actually access sectors on the drive locked the SCSI bus up solid.
Specifically, when I hooked it up to my Maxtor 120G drive and my SGI Indy, the Indy didn't see the drive. Hooking it up to my Linux box's Adaptec controller let me get the drive info (cat
The drive itself works just fine on the Linux box's IDE, as well on my Firewire bay, so that exonerates the drive. The Adaptec works just fine on my scanner, outboard 3G SCSI disk, and CD burner, so that exonerates the Linux box's SCSI controller. The SGI boots fine from its SCSI disks, exonerating the Indy.
I told Addonics all this. Their response - "We've passed that on to our engineers." Two weeks later, when I had heard nothing, I contacted them again. "We are still waiting for our engineers".
At that point I asked for an RMA. After they emailed me the RMA request form, and I faxed it back, they contact me via email - "Have you tried using our SCSI controller card - it works much better with our SCSI card."
Now, were I using some generic SCSI card from a back alley somewhere I could accept this sort of a response, but Adaptec? Excuse me, who CREATED the SCSI standard? Ignoring the fact that I seriously doubt they have a SCSI controller card for my Indy (which is what I am trying to put the drive on).
I'll be interested in hearing anybody else's experiences - after all my experience is just a datum.
But if anybody else has a different IDE to SCSI adaptor they want to recommend, please reply.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The problem is that they still go for about $100 in small quantities, so the question is where is the sweet point given the lower reliability of many IDE drives?
However it does make it possible to put together a SCSI based RAID for remarkably little outlay and normally although you would ditch the drive when a fault occurs, but this board is reusable.
See my journal, I write things there
In our 4-up DVD replicator at work the internal drive controller is SCSI, but the DVD burners are lower-cost Pioneer IDE. The solution is in reverse, but it goes to show that similar devices have existed for some time.
Any spoon would be too big.
I picked up one of these 8-disk raid boxes brand new on ebay for a couple of hundred. I'm still waiting for Maxtor to ship their 320GB disks so I can get 2+ terabytes out of it, but until then it is full of all my old IDE drives (ranging in size from 10GB to 160GB) as a JBOD and it works great under linux:
. as p?familyId=6
http://www.promise.com/product/product_list_eng
The 160MB/sec is the bandwidth of the entire SCSI bus. There are no single drives that pipe data through at that speed.
What it means is that you could have 4 SCSI drives that each do 40MB/sec all running at the same time. Or 8 at 20MB/sec. Or 2 at 80MB/sec. Whatever.
That makes it better than the IDE bus because with that one, only one drive can talk on a channel at one time.
two mouth !
Mayby the last advertising on Slashdot don't give them enougth sales !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
The Devices
The devices (pictured above) are small PCBs that attach directly to the back of the IDE/ATAPI devices and perform the necessary conversion from the IDE/ATAPI protocol to Ultra160 SCSI. These are not simple cables that perform some magic with wiring tricks but each device is a controller that can correctly convert communication back and forth from the appropriate protocols. As you can see in the photos, the devices each have a micro-controller onboard, the large chip in the ATAPI version and under the heatsink on the IDE version. Each device features upgradable firmware and comes with a 1-year warranty.
Installation
Addonics has made these completely plug-and-play and they require absolutely no drivers for any OS. Installation, therefore, could not be easier. All that you do for either device is to attach the device to the IDE connector on the back of the drive, apply power to the drive and to the converter, and finally, set the the jumpers and hook up the SCSI cable. The installation is that straight forward and is shown visually below.
Each device ships in a small box that includes the converter itself, a Y-cable to provide power to the device and the drive, and installation instructions. The instructions that come with converters are a much more detailed step-by-step process to get you up and running quickly. Also included in the instructions are jumper settings for the SCSI ID and SCSI termination.
The installation is really that easy and both converters worked the first boot without issue. The compact design allows you to install these without even removing the drives from the machine. They also fit very snug on the back of the drives which means that you will not need to rearrange your case's insides just to accommodate the converters.
Performance
The next question is obviously, "How do these perform?" We definitely don't want to lose any performance through the conversion process and we would even like to see an increase in speed through the process. One quick note is on the fact that these devices convert IDE to an Ultra160 standard which means that your SCSI bus will not slowed down by a legacy device on the bus. This is a big deal if you have an adapter that downgrades all SCSI devices to the lowest speed on the bus.
All the tests in this review were performed on a IWILL DX400-SN motherboard based platform with dual 2.8GHz Xeons. The onboard SCSI (Qlogic 12160) provided a convenient testbed and provided less opportunity for possible incompatibility.
First we'll check out the IDE to SCSI converter and run the drive through ZCAV under IDE and then SCSI. ZCAV is a utility that measures throughput at various points across a disk. In the graph below we used increments of 100MB.
Above we tried the IDE to SCSI converter on two drives, a Seagate Barracuda III 40GB and an IBM 75GXP 75GB. The graph shows very different results for each drive. The Seagate had much more steady performance with very few fluctuations running on IDE rather than SCSI. SCSI performance fluctuated wildly and overall was under the mark set by IDE. The IBM drive on the other hand actually held a steadier line on SCSI than on IDE and the performance is almost identical across the disk.
To find out more about how read/write performance would actually be on the the Seagate drive, we turned to Bonnie++ for some more detailed file system performance benchmarks.
(Sorry, the table didn't format correctly)
The above table shows that the Seagate drive in some real-world applications would perform virtually identical. You can see that the winning spot goes back and forth across tests and that the difference in the two is very small.
Now turning to the ATAPI to SCSI converter, we will once again analyze reading performance with ZCAV. In this test we used two drives, a Lite-On 48x12x48 CD-RW and a generic 52X CD-ROM. ZCAV reads were done in 10MB increments.
The ATAPI to SCSI converter seems to like both of these drives. On the Lite-On drive, the performance was identical across the disk. On the generic 52X drive, which is a terrible CD-ROM to begin with, the performance was the same across the disk until the end, where the SCSI converter seemed to actually help the drive's performance.
We also wanted to know if tasks such as CD writing would be affected by the converter. To test this we burnt the same CD image with the drive attached to IDE and then to SCSI. What we were interested in at disk burn completion was the average write speed and the minimum fill of the burn buffer. After testing we found that the drive performed identically attached to either bus. The average write speed was 32.4x and the minimum fill was 93%.
Conclusion
The first thing we wanted to mention in the conclusion is who would be interested in such a device. A couple of scenarios come to mind:
*
A user that wants to go all SCSI but can't find the devices that they want as SCSI devices. This user is one that wants/needs the advantages of SCSI or just doesn't want the overhead of having additional devices on the PCI bus (the IDE controller) or the extra drivers loaded.
*
Someone that is setting up something such as a server in which they need a large quantity of drives and doesn't want to spend the money on high-end SCSI drives. This could either be a large hard drive array or even a CD reproduction system.
In either of these situations, the converters are just what the doctor ordered. The IDE to SCSI converter had good performance on both drives, although it seems that it may work better on some drives over others. The ATAPI to SCSI converter was flawless in our testing, providing identical or even better performance to that of the device running on the IDE bus.
The price of these devices are a little higher than you might expect at $99 and $109 for the IDE to SCSI and ATAPI to SCSI converters respectfully. The price isn't too bad though when you consider the price SCSI typically carries as compared to IDE. Buying an IDE hard drive over SCSI could save you $300 or more. That would net you an over $200 in savings even with the price of the converter. The ATAPI converter's price is a little more difficult to justify with a price comparison but with the dropping price of CD-RWs to the sub-$80 mark, you wouldn't pay too much more for an IDE drive with SCSI converter over a SCSI drive at a slower speed.
Overall, We were very impressed with the quality, ease of installation, and performance of these devices. Addonics has produced devices that have been missing from the drive market for a long time and they have done it right. If these are something you've been looking for, we highly recommend them. They are more than we expected and receive both our Works with Linux Certification and the LinuxHardware.org Top Honors Award.
For those of us who have older Unix workstations that don't know how to spell IDE, these allow us to put a decent amount of storage on them for a reasonable cost.
If you are buying IDE drives, and IDE to SCSI converters, and a SCSI card, to put into your x86 box, then yes, you need to order a nice big bowl of InstaClue.
But if you are trying to install the Gnu development tools onto an old SGI Indy, this is a great idea.
If it works - see my other post in this thread.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Here's a similar story which might shed some light on where these might be useful. I admit that I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to my hobbies and my computer collection, much of which is scavenged, is no exception. For example, my current best PC has a dual-proc mobo that started out with a single Celeron CPU. Later I bought special adapters to allow me to run dual Celerons without soldering fine wires and taping over pins - my cheapness is dampened by my unease at monkeying with a soldering iron.
I have no doubt that I'm not getting the performance I would have gotten from buying a couple of PIII's, but that wasn't the point for me. After all, I'm not doing "real work" on this box. So I could see the appeal to something like this. It would let me play around with SCSI on a more modest budget, just as my adapters let me enjoy some of the benefits of a dual CPU PC on a hobbyist budget. (Like seeing two penguins when I boot!)
With the price of high-end SCSI hard drives through the rough and the lack of any decent SCSI CD-RWs or DVD-ROMs, it would be nice if there was a way to get all the benefits of SCSI without the SCSI price and without having to settle for older devices. Addonics thinks that they have the solution with their IDE to SCSI and ATAPI to SCSI adapters. Now we are out to see how well they perform and how well they work with Linux. Are these the solutions you've been looking for?
The Devices
The devices (pictured above) are small PCBs that attach directly to the back of the IDE/ATAPI devices and perform the necessary conversion from the IDE/ATAPI protocol to Ultra160 SCSI. These are not simple cables that perform some magic with wiring tricks but each device is a controller that can correctly convert communication back and forth from the appropriate protocols. As you can see in the photos, the devices each have a micro-controller onboard, the large chip in the ATAPI version and under the heatsink on the IDE version. Each device features upgradable firmware and comes with a 1-year warranty.
Installation
Addonics has made these completely plug-and-play and they require absolutely no drivers for any OS. Installation, therefore, could not be easier. All that you do for either device is to attach the device to the IDE connector on the back of the drive, apply power to the drive and to the converter, and finally, set the the jumpers and hook up the SCSI cable. The installation is that straight forward and is shown visually below.
IDE to SCSI Installation
ATAPI to SCSI Installation
Each device ships in a small box that includes the converter itself, a Y-cable to provide power to the device and the drive, and installation instructions. The instructions that come with converters are a much more detailed step-by-step process to get you up and running quickly. Also included in the instructions are jumper settings for the SCSI ID and SCSI termination.
The installation is really that easy and both converters worked the first boot without issue. The compact design allows you to install these without even removing the drives from the machine. They also fit very snug on the back of the drives which means that you will not need to rearrange your case's insides just to accommodate the converters.
Performance
The next question is obviously, "How do these perform?" We definitely don't want to lose any performance through the conversion process and we would even like to see an increase in speed through the process. One quick note is on the fact that these devices convert IDE to an Ultra160 standard which means that your SCSI bus will not slowed down by a legacy device on the bus. This is a big deal if you have an adapter that downgrades all SCSI devices to the lowest speed on the bus.
All the tests in this review were performed on a IWILL DX400-SN motherboard based platform with dual 2.8GHz Xeons. The onboard SCSI (Qlogic 12160) provided a convenient testbed and provided less opportunity for possible incompatibility.
First we'll check out the IDE to SCSI converter and run the drive through ZCAV under IDE and then SCSI. ZCAV is a utility that measures throughput at various points across a disk. In the graph below we used increments of 100MB.
Above we tried the IDE to SCSI converter on two drives, a Seagate Barracuda III 40GB and an IBM 75GXP 75GB. The graph shows very different results for each drive. The Seagate had much more steady performance with very few fluctuations running on IDE rather than SCSI. SCSI performance fluctuated wildly and overall was under the mark set by IDE. The IBM drive on the other hand actually held a steadier line on SCSI than on IDE and the performance is almost identical across the disk.
To find out more about how read/write performance would actually be on the the Seagate drive, we turned to Bonnie++ for some more detailed file system performance benchmarks.
[ table ]
The above table shows that the Seagate drive in some real-world applications would perform virtually identical. You can see that the winning spot goes back and forth across tests and that the difference in the two is very small.
Now turning to the ATAPI to SCSI converter, we will once again analyze reading performance with ZCAV. In this test we used two drives, a Lite-On 48x12x48 CD-RW and a generic 52X CD-ROM. ZCAV reads were done in 10MB increments.
The ATAPI to SCSI converter seems to like both of these drives. On the Lite-On drive, the performance was identical across the disk. On the generic 52X drive, which is a terrible CD-ROM to begin with, the performance was the same across the disk until the end, where the SCSI converter seemed to actually help the drive's performance.
We also wanted to know if tasks such as CD writing would be affected by the converter. To test this we burnt the same CD image with the drive attached to IDE and then to SCSI. What we were interested in at disk burn completion was the average write speed and the minimum fill of the burn buffer. After testing we found that the drive performed identically attached to either bus. The average write speed was 32.4x and the minimum fill was 93%.
Conclusion
The first thing we wanted to mention in the conclusion is who would be interested in such a device. A couple of scenarios come to mind:
* A user that wants to go all SCSI but can't find the devices that they want as SCSI devices. This user is one that wants/needs the advantages of SCSI or just doesn't want the overhead of having additional devices on the PCI bus (the IDE controller) or the extra drivers loaded.
* Someone that is setting up something such as a server in which they need a large quantity of drives and doesn't want to spend the money on high-end SCSI drives. This could either be a large hard drive array or even a CD reproduction system.
In either of these situations, the converters are just what the doctor ordered. The IDE to SCSI converter had good performance on both drives, although it seems that it may work better on some drives over others. The ATAPI to SCSI converter was flawless in our testing, providing identical or even better performance to that of the device running on the IDE bus.
The price of these devices are a little higher than you might expect at $99 and $109 for the IDE to SCSI and ATAPI to SCSI converters respectfully. The price isn't too bad though when you consider the price SCSI typically carries as compared to IDE. Buying an IDE hard drive over SCSI could save you $300 or more. That would net you an over $200 in savings even with the price of the converter. The ATAPI converter's price is a little more difficult to justify with a price comparison but with the dropping price of CD-RWs to the sub-$80 mark, you wouldn't pay too much more for an IDE drive with SCSI converter over a SCSI drive at a slower speed.
Overall, We were very impressed with the quality, ease of installation, and performance of these devices. Addonics has produced devices that have been missing from the drive market for a long time and they have done it right. If these are something you've been looking for, we highly recommend them. They are more than we expected and receive both our Works with Linux Certification and the LinuxHardware.org Top Honors Award.
The idea is not to place a SCSI drive on an IDE bus, but to place an IDE drive on a SCSI bus.
You might try reading the article before posting - sometimes there's actually useful information there.
www.eFax.com are spammers
It's nice to find a slashbot that can take a joke.
As opposed to all those SCSI adapters that don't.
Still, looks like it could be a great product. I'd like to see long-term reliability stats, which obviously can't exist yet, but this bodes well.
You are not the customer.
Usually, what I have done is too simply look for a newer used computer that still has 1 ISA slot left in it. Pentium chipsets still have these here and there up to the Pentium III, and AMD chipsets can be found that use today's Athlon XP 2200's. I myself have a Tbird 1000 running on a KT7A-RAID motherboard that has 1 ISA slot at home, though I don't use the slot. When I built computers for the lab, I used this mobo because of this reason.
kinda on topic. i was wondering if there was a little more native solution for having a box full of ide drives connected to a computer with an external ide interface? right now i have a box with my scsi stuff (tape, mo drive, cdr, cdrw, etc), but i use ide drives because i just cannot beat the price. i have the scsi stuff connected to my computer with a scsi cable.
since putting more than 3 hard drives in my case makes things a little crowded, i was wondering if there was an alternative similar to what i've done with the scsi stuff.
-- john
This is so old I don't even know where to start dating it. lets see.
1986 MFMto SASI converter. 5 inch converter card
used on tape drives (quater inch drives) This
was almost all sun tape drives at the time.
2001 bought an IDE to 80MBi/s converter from dirt
cheap drives.
So there are two data points. These devices have been around since scsi was evolved from sasi. his is such a non news story...
Donaldson
Being able to use an IDE drive on a SCSI bus doesn't change the fact that IDE drives are crap, and tend to have extremely high mortality rates compared to SCSI.
You can't beat around the bush. If you want quality, you have to pay for it. Real SCSI is worth it.
I hate seeing all of these people say "IDE is as fast as SCSI nowadays". Get a clue! My previous SCSI drive was a Quantum Atlas 10K II. It spanks my WD 120GB 8MB cache IDE drive all over the place. But now I have replaced the Quantum with a larger Cheetah 15k.3 SCSI drive. This thing absolutely hauls ass.
Yeah, SCSI is expensive. But it's a hell of a lot more reliable and a hell of a lot faster. Check storagereview.com.
Err, the answer is painfully obvious.
Write down the cost of a 200GB IDE hard drive (the western digital ones are quite speedy and have 8MB cache). Then add the cost of IDE/SCSI converter.
Now, compare that figure with the cost of a 200GB SCSI drive- *IF* you can even find such a beast.
For bonus points, figure out how much an 8-drive IDE RAID enclosure that presents a SCSI interface to a host computer, or an 8-drive 3ware internal RAID controller will save you when populated with 200GB IDE drives over a pure SCSI solution.
Many usage patterns need high capacity, but not require the benefits that high end SCSI drives provide over IDE. Why pay 5X as much for them if you don't need to?
With a 5-fold savings, you can buy more drives and use a RAID, increasing both your reliability and your performance over a single scsi drive solution.
I love a review that starts off by parroting some incorrect preconception. There are plenty of good SCSI optical drives. Yamaha makes a 44/24/44 CD-RW, Plextor makes a 40/12/40 CD-RW. Pioneer makes 10X DVD-ROM drives, and there are also DVD-RAM and DVD-/+R for SCSI.
Our first real unix machine was a Masscomp MC6300. They were bought out some time ago by some organisation which had a double-parallelogram sytle logo, which I can't for the life of me remember the name of. Anyhow, it had 4Mb RAM, Motorola MC68030 CPU at 50MHz, MC68881 FPU, and an onboard SCSI controller.
Attached to this SCSI controller was a bridge module, which controlled two MFM hard drives (We had a Micropolis 81 (an old DEC RD53) and a Maxtor drive (a DEC RD54 (which for some really wierd reason had a built-in speaker)) attached to it. Also on the bridge controller were interfaces to a QIC-150 tape cartridge drive, and a standard shugart bus floppy controller. Each device appeared as one LUN (logical unit number) on SCSI ID 0.
I've still got this controller somewhere; I pulled it out on the basis it might be useful, when we dismantled the old masscomp. (Mind you, I've still got the CPU board from our Gandalf serial switch, which is a work of art; completely wire-wrapped assembley - wooo!)
We also had an optical drive array with an 'OCU' device attached to it, which presented seven SCSI drives as LUNs on a single SCSI ID; worked perfectly well, and saved on having multiple host controllers or getting into a situation where SCSI ID's are as rare as free IRQ's are on Ix86 boxen nowadays. (And certain operating systems still haven't got the hang of proper IRQ sharing as implemented by the PCI specification).
It should be fairly trivial therefore to build a board which has a SCSI port, designed to fit a U320 bus, and provides, say, eight LUNs worth of IDE drives. Mind you, the cables would be a nightmare...
I read that someone was looking for a isa to pci adapter. at http://www.costronic.com they have a great assortment of pci to isa bridges. I also read alot of people telling them that it wasn't possible because of speed and size. Please take the time to do your research and many times you'll find that people have already thought of it and made it.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Will it fit inside a Sun 411 drive case ... with an IDE drive, of course? It's pretty tight in the back in there. But if it will fit, that would be cool. OK, maybe a little warm. You know what I mean.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Who knows if this is true but I just took an A+ certification course for easy credits and they asserted that many SCSI disks are IDE disks with an IDE to SCSI controller attached to them. This sounded bogus to me, I would think that they would have the same logic on the disk side, and two versions of the chip, one with IDE out and one with SCSI. Either way, can anyone comment on this?
Also I thought part of the new IDE spec was tagged queueing but people are saying that you won't have tagged queueing using one of these devices. First of all doesn't IDE have that now, in the newest devices, or is that a Serial ATA thing? And second, couldn't the SCSI-to-IDE adapter do tagged queueing?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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For those of you that keep saying 'It makes no sense because you spend the difference of cost on the adapter', here is some help with very simple math:
From pricewatch.com as of today:
180GB IDE: $257
181.6GB SCSI: $894
160GB IDE: $223
146GB SCSI: $890
If you consider that the adapter costs about $100 (MSRP, so you'll probably pay less) then it's still worth it by a long shot for large capacity drives.
Also note that those SCSI drive prices seem a little low. They're usually a _LOT_ more.
Of course, if you buy a new system and decide to get a scsi card, this adapter and ide drives, you deserve to get kicked in the head, BUT if you are for example trying to gain cheap extra storage (for not mission-critical data) to add onto existing scsi systems, then this can shave of half the cost or more.
Reinard
This "review" claims Western Digital's IDE drive outperforms SCSI.
Don't bother looking for evidence to back up the claim, because there isn't any. The only time SCSI is even mentioned is in the title and the summary.
Oh, and by the way, Western Digital uses the quote "'Outperforms SCSI Drives' - Toms Hardware" on the retail box of the product.
Now they need to come out with RAID models. That is, it would have the usual SCSI connector(s), but 2 or more (a model with 2, a model with 4, and a model with 8, would be a nice lineup) IDE connectors. Then you can fill up an external drive case with cheap IDE drives, and attach it via SCSI for a cheap terabyte box. Some means to configure it would be needed and it should default to bunch of disks mode before configured.
The same thing but with a Firewire interface to the computer would be nice, too.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
append="hd[x]=ide-scsi"
Be the first kid on your block to own this amazing devi...er...line of text!!
Sheesh...
http://www.datoptic.com/fwu2-ide.html
- 20 0.htm
d uc ts.htm
http://www.usbgear.com/usa/item_420.html
http://www.veriplus.com/pages/media-storage/UDA
http://www.deltrontech.com/USB/USBIDE/U-IDE.htm
http://www.indigita.com/products/prod_bridgepro
Enter the conversion.
Adaptec makes a pricey 4-port external SCSI card. That's a total of 14*4 usuable drives on a single bus. SCSI drives ARE expensive and when you have 40 of them, it's way more expensive, even with the converters. I see these converters as an ideal way to built multi-Terrabyte arrays at 3/4 or less of the cost of a SCSI array.
I bought such an adapter from a japanese company about 3 years ago. I'm not sure if I bought it from a retailer or directly from the manufacturer, since I had to use a translation tool to convert the japanese characters to figure out how to use the online ordering system.
The box it came in was worth the money alone. A lot of good engrish, like "Will reduce CPU power of system".
Anyway, the adapter is alive and works fine in my SGI Indigo 2 workstation, with a 27 GB IBM-drive.
Let's compare two 15k rpm drives with 3.5ms seek. In the SCSI corner we can get a Seagate Cheetah X15 36LP or IBM 36Z15. SCSI warrantees are usually 5 years.
In the IDE corner, um. Yeah. There are no IDE drives at 10k or 15 rpm. And IDE warrantees have gone from 3 years down to 1 year.
On the other hand there don't seem to be any SCSI DVD writers.
Yoghurt
www.Synetic.net, a local company here in Victoria (BC,Canada) makes a decent IDE->SCSI solution. They import the parts from Asia and assemble and test them here.
They have a wide variety of models, ranging from small adapters for a single drive to extensive RAID systems for servers. The single drive adapter is about 100$ Canadian.
Why the hell do I want a IDE drive? Their slow and unreliable.
These devices will cause SCSI drive manufacturers to produce cheaper drives.
Is there a technical reason you couldn't take a 200GB IDE drive and make it a native SCSI drive? Not really. The physical parts of the drive aren't dependant on the interface. Western Digital could just as easily make a 250GB SCSI drive as they can a 250GB IDE.
So why aren't SCSI manufacturers doing this? Until now they've been able to prop up the margins in the SCSI market by keeping it a 'high end' product. The SCSI drives you stick in your servers are often better peices of hardware than your cheapo IDE drives. I've got 18GB SCSI drives here that are built like bricks. They aren't cheap drives with SCSI controllers instead of IDE. Building cheap drives with SCSI would begin to erode their high end market. That's why they won't do it.
However, someone just did it for them. Now that the market has been opened, look for drive manufacturers to start releasing large SCSI drives. If they don't, they lose this midrange market segment AND the high end market still takes a hit.
Tech prediction for 2003: 200GB SCSI drives for $400 to $500 bucks.
At several points in the review they credit the devices with being U160.
Unfortuantely, according to Addonics own marketing materials, the adapters top out at U80.
SO we've got a very limited review, of an expensive item, that allows you to use cheaply made drives on server class systems, putting your data at greater risk. And the "review" has technical errors in it.
I think I'll pass.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Ive spent a lot of time with microtech dvd duplicators - they use these adapters. Specifically, I was able to connect 12 IDE DVD-R devices to a PC several feet away by using IDE to SCSI adapters and a couple of nice long SCSI cables. Beats the IDE ribbon cable limitation problem, and allows you to spread your devices out, instead of trying to cram a bunch of devices into one box.
It's not the case.
Now I can have the reliability of IDE for the cost-effectiveness of SCSI!
Oh, wait...
I not even sure this is a good idea. Your not get SCSI preformance from this adapter, only the ability to connect IDE devices to your SCSI control, which is cool for home users. Do not for a second think it would be cool to use it in a server, IDE devices is't up for it, they aren't designed for running 24 hours a day with high loads.
Still it would be great fun to try it out a workstation, if it wasn't because SCSI controllers where so damn expensive.
IDE interface -> IDE to SCSI convertor -> SCSI to IDE convertor -> IDE drive.
That would have been a very good test as to the quality of the convertors - making sure that their emulation is consistent and correct.
Yamaha offer the same thing as SC2200 SCSI Convertor, and cost only half as much! Besides, why buy now when we can wait for Serial Attached SCSI to settle down, and get the universal SCSI/SATA converter? The drive doesn't get any faster than native ATA anyway, so what's the point? If you are looking for ATA RAID on a SCSI, it's better (and cheaper) of to use external RAIDZONE boxes than SCSI retrofit.
These products are NOT new others have been making them for years.w .html or this onew .html this one looks alot like the one addonics is selling doesn't it?
Here is one that mounts UNDER a low profile (aren't most of them like this?) ide
drive making it about the same height as an atapi cdrom drive.
http://www.acard.com/eng/product/scside/ars-2000f
http://www.acard.com/eng/product/scside/aec-7720u
Just because some company gets a write up on something at linuxhardware.org
does not make it new or news.
sparkeyjames
If sense were common everyone would have it!
It is ironic. I've been researching putting together an external data pool for MP3's, MPEGS, Books, etc... that would be accessible to 3 different machines.
r ebridgeboards.htm primarily because it eleveated the need for a large power supply. I'm wishing for an 8 drive bay but will settle for 4 until i have the money for more. The case and power supply will be from an old P133. Its tall enough for 8 and i'm 're-creating' the front into book splines to blend into the 'library' setting. Anyway 2 bridge boards at $90 + $300 (WD2000BB 200GB 7200 RPM EIDE Drive,2MB cache) for a rough total of $1500, tax_man etc... BTW none of the Firewire or USB bridge boards utilize anything faster than ATA100.
I discounted SCSI off the bat as being too expensive because of the cost of the drives. I found USB and Firewire bridge boards and was leaning towards Firewire. USB bridge boards are actually more expensive than Firewire. I had decided on this chasis mount bridge board http://www.granitedigital.com/catalog/pg19_firewi
Now if I would have done the same with SCSI I would have to pay $900 for each drive.
Using the ISA/SCSI bridge boards it would cost ($300 + 99)/drive + a controller built into the case. Though if I had an old SCSI RAID boxen with no drives in it I could see putting $400 per drive into it instead of $900.
This is for the home of course and I believe that you would have to be on 'happy_trails_powder' to use it in a production environment.
met them at comdex, ordered a few two weeks ago. Very very cool, and about $20 cheaper than the reviewed ones. Adaptec 2940UW now has two 80G ide's on it - and the 4 4.3G SCSI too!
JON
We would already have seen a drop in the cost of SCSI drives. The IDE->SCSI adapters have been around atleast four years that I can remember.
We would only see a drop in price if this caught onto the main stream, no way else.
Om, nomnomnom...
I have one question. how can I convert from scsi-lvd to ide? I have a couple lvd scsi drives but the price of an lvd controler card is way too much to warrent making any use of them. Now if there was a converter that could let me use those lvd drives without paying $300 for a controler, I'd buy one.
I always knew it was possible to make a "ATA to SCSI converter" by simply buiding a pluggable circuit with a SCSI logic controller on it into the ATA device, but what would the point be?
Assuming that you have a metric fuckton of cash to blow, you could make one hell of a RAID system with this and a SCSI card that I have. Go to eBay and buy an IBM ServeRAID 3 SCSI card. This is a card that does RAID onboard, and has 3 Adaptec chips on it for a total capacity of 45 (!) drives (15 per channel, 3 channels). Grab one of those for the whole $35 it cost me to buy originally, 45 SCSI -> IDE controllers, and 45 320GB IDE drives. Instant 14.4 TB raid array! You can only use one channel per raidset, so you'd really have 3x 5tb logical drives to work with (or just 45 drives to software-raid together), but still! Imagine a beowulf cluster of the porn stored on that!
Total cost:
$35 ServeRAID controller
$4500 45x IDE-SCSI adapters @ $100 ea
$23625 45x 320gb IDE drives @ $525 ea
$100 Shitload of cabling
$400 Good enclosure for 45 drives
Total price: $28,660 for 14.4TB, or $1.99 per GB (Price goes up a bit if you use RAID5, as capacity is dropped some)
Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, which have a lining of Iridium & Strontium 90)
Go to the TPC website and take a look at score reports for the TPC-C benchmark, which is an online transaction processing (OLTP) benchmark going back 10 years or so.
Score reports for most mid-end IA-32 quad-processor servers reveal that they are using several four-channel Ultra-160 SCSI RAID controllers, and fifteen hard drives per channel. My professional experience with TPC-C shows that the hard drives' throughput get maxed out way before the SCSI channel bandwidth does, and we're talking 15 drives per SCSI channel. That's why these benchmark results are still obtained with Ultra-160 controllers and drives instead of Ultra-320. The extra bus bandwidth of Ultra-320 SCSI doesn't buy you much because the fastest disks out there cannot churn out data fast enough to max out a Ultra-160 interface.
I was recently looking at both IDE and SCSI drive specs on manufacturers' websites. I saw Ultra-160 and Ultra-320 SCSI devices with seek times of 3.5 ms and rotational speeds of 15,000 RPM. But most IDE drive families are still at 7,200 RPM max and have seek times of 8.5 ms or more. The better seek times and rotational speeds are the main reason I would upgrade my storage to SCSI (if the costs were not so high, that is :-). The product reviewed here provides exactly the reverse of the functionality I want. As such, I think it's useful only for specialized applications like putting an IDE CD-RW in a SCSI-only workstation or server.
Maxtor did this with thier 6000 product line which started shipping last year. Maxtor has been OEMing a SCSI to IDE box for a lower cost NetApp filer for over a year now. Nothing new and exciting here.
SCSI is a parallel interface standard used by Apple Macintosh computers, PCs, and many UNIX systems for attaching peripheral devices to computers. Nearly all Apple Macintosh computers, excluding only the earliest Macs and the recent iMac, come with a SCSI port for attaching devices such as disk drives and printers.
This info is a bit outdated. Every Mac since 1999 comes with on board IDE instead of SCSI. The consumer Macs even had IDE back in 1996 (when I got a Performa 6300). Apple switched from SCSI to IDE in the pro-line when they released the B&W G3s. Today PCI SCSI cards are a BTO option in PowerMacs.
SCSI was also used by graphics pros to hook scanners up to. Printers were more often on the printer port (a serial Mac port) or on a network connection.
I have been through this problem quite a few times; the place where I work distributes an industrial control system, which relies on ISA cards to network (through double bus ARCNETs yikes!) and do some data aquisition through ISA only adapters.
In the last 5 years, getting PCs with enough ISA slots (there have been up to 5 slots needed in one machine) has become a nightmare. Many times, we turned to DELL to have them make one custom batch of PCs for our needs. Recently our providers have suggested that we use some industrial PCs. This little things have tons of expansion slots, many of them are ISA type slots.
A couple of issues have comed up with this machines, first, they are far from being "state of the art" hardware (the customer always complains about getting shity PCs), and second, their support outside the US is non existant (so we end up stocking two or three extra machines).
Good luck with your Firewire bridges. I have not had good luck with mine (Oxford 911) under W2K - random disk errors, "MFT" errors, and occassionally the drive will just disappear. I suspect this is because the driver isn't SMP safe, but who knows. Also, published benches show a noticible performance loss with the FW bridge, unlike this SCSI thing.
aka the web page, clearly state U80.
I don't have the device, so I didn't have a manual handy to whip out. I suppose I could have dug a little deeper, but I assumed the company would put their *best* foot forward with their marketing. Rare to see someone understate their products capabilities.
If I'd been reviewing a product that over-delivered, I'd probably mention in the review, that the product did more than it promised.
After reading the review, I flipped over to the website, and the U80 spec jumped out at me.
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
Of course :) Seagate SCSI rules... I still love my 18GB 10K RPM SCSI drive (Cheetah). Even though it's not a large drive by today's standards, my needs on the Linux box don't exceed about ~12GB anyways (that leaves 6GB to spare).
You don't believe me?
Go ask Scott Mueller
I'd quote the related passage concerning this myself, but I don't happen to have my book handy right now to look it up.
Besides, your arguement about interface differences is totally off the point, since nowhere did i ever claim that the ATA and SCSI interface protocols were the same thing, I was talking about the hardware.
Perhaps you should do your own homework before you insult someone else and make a fool out of yourself in public by arguing the wrong point.
and besides that, I have a 9GB Cheetah (10K RPM also) sitting in the other bay... used for downloads and misc storage. It is much noiser than the 18 gig though.. I assume it was a first generation 10K drive. My 18G is waayy more quiet.
I've had the privilege of using one of these at work. But it seems that I'm using it for a completely different purpose than the typical /.er.
;)
At work, I manage several HP-UX workstations. These are older models (B132L+, B180L) and only have SCSI interfaces -- no IDE.
We're currently looking into DVD-RW and related media for data archiving. But all of the reasonably priced DVD writing drives are IDE, not SCSI. The only SCSI DVD writer I found, last time I looked around the web, ran $2500!
A Sony DVD+RW IDE drive costs $300. An IDE-to-SCSI converter costs around $65. You also need a Y-cable for the power, since the B-series workstations don't have a third power cable for the adapter. (The one we're using requires external power.) Anyway, cram that all inside the case (not trivial, but possible) and you get a SCSI DVD writer that works just fine in HP-UX for less than $400 USD.
Now, if only there were actually DVD+RW software available for non-Linux systems... that would make my life much easier. But I'll settle for DVD-RW.
http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/idescsi.html
also, lots of other useful SGI info.
Max.
Max.
Suppose you want a PC connected to, say, 10 disk drives, in order to implement RAID 5+1 in software. What you do is: take a SCSI controller, and connect to 10 IDE drives, using this device. This is the most cost-effective way! There is no other way I know to connect a large array of IDE drives to a PC. Using SCSI will cost much more.
I've used IDE-SCSI convertors with IDE CDR burners.
In Unices, they work wonderfully, which is fine by me. But a friend of mine, who uses Windows mostly, bought a Sony CDRW drive, Adaptec SCSI controller and an IDE-SCSI convertor.
In my system (OpenBSD), it all works fine, but in his Windows machine, most software we tried (Latest Nero, EZCD, etc) would not find the CDRW drive. They would scan the IDE and SCSI busses, but not find any drive that they "know" it seems. With the Sony plugged in to the IDE bus, there was no problem. It's as if they can only use drive models that they are aware of, rather than falling back on a generic driver.
Burning from within WinXP's built in burning worked fine, but bloody slow to even get to the point of burning.
BTW, Yamaha's new SCSI burners are actually IDE burners with Yamaha supplied IDE-SCSI convertors.
The unit we tried is an ARC760 based unit from here.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
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supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type
programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close
communication.
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