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."

Comments

Re:Wish I could read the article.....

[Kenja]

Wrong idea. These let you use IDE devices on a SCSI controler.

so

[tps12]

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?

Re:so

[pmz]

...slower SCSI bus.

Troll.

Ever since 40MB/sec SCSI came out...there really is no need for anything faster in a workstation...until hard drives become dramatically faster. Most workstations have no more than two hard drives (get it? 2 X 20MB/sec = 40MB/sec).

Only servers and workstations with massive external storage arrays benefit from multiple high-bandwidth SCSI controllers, such as FibreChannel, Ultra160 or Ultra320. Those bus speeds handle the aggregate bandwidths of the hard drives.

...faster, but less dependable IDE drives...

I still don't see 10,000 or 15,000RPM IDE drives, do you?

In Case It Gets Slashdotted, Here's The Summary

[robbyjo]

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.

Re:In Case It Gets Slashdotted, Here's The Summary

[pmz]

The performance of the IDE drives are almost the same as their SCSI counterparts.

I'd like to see real non-single-user benchmarks. Multi-user UNIX environments and/or RAID are where SCSI shines. I trust SCSI's ability to aggregate the drives to truly utilize the bus' bandwidth better than I would trust IDE. IDE has always been designed from the single-user PC point of view.

I remember seeing a review of IDE RAID controllers a while back. The aggregate performance shown on the benchmarks was disappointing (gaining only a couple percent performance gain from a striped or mirrored array)--I'd think much better should be possible.

Doesn't make sense.

[_narf_]

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.

Is There a Market for This?

[Grip3n]

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?

Re:I've used these and....

[Dimensio]

Where can you get a cheap 120GB SCSI drive?

I've a nice Adaptec card, the 18GB SCSI drive that I have in my machine still costs more now than the 120GB IDE drive that I stuffed in recently.

Yes, you are missing something

[wowbagger]

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.

Wrong way, Feldmen....

[wowbagger]

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.

Re:What is the point?

[tchuladdiass]

I think the point is one of the following
a) You want to hook up a bunch of devices, and scsi gives you 15 drives per chain, where your on-board IDE only gives you 4 devices total (I know, this can be taken care of with additional IDE cards)
b) You have a device that isn't available in a scsi version, and you have an all-scsi system (which is why these adapters were historicaly marketed to Mac users)
c) You want to cheaply stock up your SCSI raid system
This is what I want to do: use this put 2-3 cheap huge IDE drives on my scsi raid card, stripe them, and then carve out numerous logical drives from this pool. I haven't seen an IDE-raid card that lets you define logical drives, where most scsi raids do. Why do I want to use logical drives instead of partitions? Well, some OS's want to be installed in a primary partition (FreeBSD), and most want at least their boot code below 1024 cylindars, so being able to take 100-200 gig of cheap IDE drives and define a bunch of 8-gig logical devices allows me to play with more (and more versions of) various OS's, and makes upgrading easier/safer (install new version of a given os on new logical drive, then copy stuff over as needed).

this works well for lots o devices

[Fable]

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.

They didn't do the obvious test..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.