Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Lowdown SCSI Blues

Until recently I had no idea SCSI had so many variants. My companies MRP server has two SCSI interfaces. The old one a single ended(SE) fast SCSI(50pin) and a newer one a High Voltage Differential(HVD) fast wide SCSI(68pin). The only issue is, most HVD drives run $120+ since HVD has since been replaced by the newer low voltage diff standard(LVD). I did some research and discovered most LVD devices will fall back to an SE bus. This is great except the target bus is the newer HVD no SE one. The older SE bus has difficulty with more then three devices ATM. After some digging, I discovered the SCSI extender/converter. These devices claim transparent support for piggybacking LVD/SE devices onto HVD and visa versa. So I should be able to purchase the cheaper SCSI wide SE drives, an extender and be good to go... in theory. It will be slower then an HVD system, but how much speed do you need when the system has a 33mhz cpu? My only concern with the whole arrangement is if the OS will accept SE devices on an HVD bus, driver wise.

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