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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.
From this?
Wrong idea. These let you use IDE devices on a SCSI controler.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
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
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 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.
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
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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)
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...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW