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IDE/ATAPI to SCSI Converters Reviewed

Posted by michael on from the duct-tape dept.

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."

9 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Some links by bahwi · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Now you notice? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. IDE/ATAPI - SCSI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative
    • IDE
      • Abbreviation of either Intelligent Drive Electronics or Integrated Drive Electronics, depending on who you ask. An IDE interface is an interface for mass storage devices, in which the controller is integrated into the disk or CD-ROM drive.
    • ATAPI
      • Short for AT Attachment Packet Interface, an extension to EIDE (also called ATA-2) that enables the interface to support CD-ROM players and tape drives.
    • SCSI
      • Acronym for small computer system interface. Pronounced "scuzzy," 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.
  4. Re:Is There a Market for This? by Sloppy · · Score: 3, Informative
    • Computer doesn't have any IDE capability, but does have SCSI. (This isn't uncommon for just about any platform other than x86 clones.)
    • Computer can use IDE drives, but it's already maxed out. (e.g. You have 4 devices and want to add a 5th)
    • Computer can use IDE drives, but its implementation of IDE is poor (e.g. only PIO, no DMA) but you have a very good SCSI implementation (I'm thinking of my old A3000 with its Buddha card, or x86 clones from the mid 1990s or earlier)
    • You have an external enclosure that already has SCSI connector(s) both inside and outside
    • You want to have many drives (up to 7 or 15)
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  5. Re:ISA Adapters by nsample · · Score: 4, Informative


    It's a nice idea, but the main reason that ISA-to-PCI is not a solution out there already is a simple one: physical contraints of the system. An ISA-to-PCI adapter would not fit in any standard chassis and still have enough room to mount the ISA card. The IDE-to-SCSI solution leverages the fact that there's room to move in a case; drives tend not to be tight fits, unlike cards.


    That being said, if you find a good one someday, let me know! I have more ISA data acquisition cards in the lab than I can shake a stick at, and they're not cheap.

  6. ISA-USB by DrLudicrous · · Score: 3, Informative
    Well, there is an option I just noticed but have not tried out myself. There is an ISA-USB device sold by ARS Technologies (http://www.arstech.com/usbisa.htm) that may or may not be suitable. They have both internal and external converters for about $120.

    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.

  7. Storage Storage Storage by Outland+Traveller · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. These are not new. Here are some others. by sparkeyjames · · Score: 4, Informative

    These products are NOT new others have been making them for years.
    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-2000fw .html or this one
    http://www.acard.com/eng/product/scside/aec-7720uw .html this one looks alot like the one addonics is selling doesn't it?
    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!

  9. Re:"IDE outperforms SCSI" - Toms Hardware by aussersterne · · Score: 3, Informative

    The problem with all of these IDE vs. SCSI performance discussions is that "performance" is a context-sensitive term.

    Today's IDE drives can probably push more streamed data per unit time through an interface, however, if you can't afford intermittent burps in sustained throughput, SCSI still outperforms, and once you load a bus with multiple drives and try to use them simultaneously, IDE really begins to falter because the IDE specification is not terribly friendly to bus sharing.

    And of course in database-type environments with many, many seek and small read and write operations going on, IDE drives completely suck in comparison to the much smaller average access and command queueing of SCSI.

    So it depends on what "performance" means to you...

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