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IDE/ATAPI to SCSI Converters Reviewed 271

Posted by michael 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."
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IDE/ATAPI to SCSI Converters Reviewed More

IDE/ATAPI to SCSI Converters Reviewed

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  • I've used these and.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:22PM (#4931817)
    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.

    • Re:I've used these and.... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What about IBM's queue reordering with their new 180gxp drives? IDE *seems* to have a primative version of this now.
      • What about IBM's queue reordering with their new 180gxp drives?

        That is indeed an interesting question. Does this converter actully support that feature? And can an IDE drive with such a converter perform as good as a SCSI drive, assuming both drive and converter is implemented correctlly?

        I'm sure it is possible to create an IDE controller that can match the performance of this converter connected to the best of all SCSI controllers. So the only reasons for prefering this converter over a good IDE controller are:
        • Price
        • Lack of sockets for installing IDE controllers
        • The cable mess with a lot of IDE channels.
    • 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.
    • Have you priced 120GB SCSI drives? $1000-ish. IDE would be about $120. Plus $100 for an adapter. $220 < $1000. Why do it? SCSI RAID controllers are still better in general and better supported in Linux is one case you might consider it. I dunno.
      • Ahh, I think the Original Poster ment to say that with this "solution", you could get a cheap SCSI 120 gig out of an IDE 120 Gig+SCSI Adapter, but it's not worth it. But what do I know?
    • The product I'm looking at [addonics.com] allows you to add IDE drives to a SCSI bus, rather than allowing you to add SCSI drives to an IDE bus. The reason for doing this would be obvious -- you want to attach lots of IDE drives to a computer for some reason (large RAID?), but don't happen to have lots of IDE controller channels and interrupts hanging around. So instead of having 15 IDE channels, you have 1 SCSI controller talking to 15 IDE hard drives via these controller boards. In fact, I know of one storage device manufacturer (sorry, NDA) who is going to be producing a product that utilizes these little widgets so that they can use inexpensive IDE drives rather than expensive SCSI drives in their product. Sure, it's not going to be as fast as a 15000RPM Barracuda. But even with the extra cost of the board, it'll be less than half the price for performance that's not much worse (once you consider the RAID).

      -E

  • Wow (Score:3, Funny)

    by fernd1 ( 582087 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:22PM (#4931818)
    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.

  • Old news (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mattyohe ( 517995 )
    IDE to SCSI Converters?
    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=02/10/03/02 42257&mode=thread&tid=137

  • How is that different (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:23PM (#4931826) Journal
    From this [slashdot.org]?

  • Conversion of price? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Steveftoth ( 78419 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:25PM (#4931837) Homepage
    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?
    • 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?

      These adaptors would be useful for mass storage, such as a huge MP3 or video collection. Mass storage with SCSI drives is extremely expensive, and the drives are smaller. Size and price are big benefits if IDE drives.

  • so (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:25PM (#4931839) Homepage Journal
    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?

    • Yes, you are missing something (Score:4, Insightful)

      by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:40PM (#4931974) Homepage Journal
      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.

    • Re:so (Score:2)

      by dago ( 25724 )
      yep, you just inverted speed comments : it should be sth like "cheaper, slower, less dependable IDE drive" on "faster SCSI bus".

      but anyway, the conclusion is that there's no performance gain in using those things, it's just for legacy or other compatibility issues.

    • Re:so (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pmz ( 462998 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @04:07PM (#4932152) Homepage
      ...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?

      • Re:so (Score:2, Informative)

        by Captain Morgan ( 160029 )
        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).

        This is quite bogus. A single drive can easily exceed 40MB/s sequential transfer and your hard drive is the slowest storage device on most pcs.

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

        It is quite a bit more difficult to build a 10k or 15k drive than it is to build a 7.2k rpm drive. You don't see 10 or 15k ide drives only because of cost. Probably in the next year or so you'll see the first 10k ide drive. 10k is almost a necessity with todays computers as 7200 has such a high average access time.

        Chris

      • Re:so (Score:2)

        by Sivar ( 316343 )
        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).

        The Seagate Cheetah X15.3, the world's fastest HDD, has an outside track transfer rate of 76.4MB/sec.

        The Western Digital WD2000JB has an outside track transfer rate of 56.5 MB/sec.

        (Note, ones you stop doing linear I/O, like the real world, the Cheetah utterly blows away the WD drive)

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

        You are correct, no such IDE drives exist.
    • 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.

  • In Case It Gets Slashdotted, Here's The Summary (Score:4, Insightful)

    by robbyjo ( 315601 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:25PM (#4931840) Homepage

    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.

    • 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.

  • What is the point? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by slashbofh ( 622003 )
    This is a single device you have to purchase for every device you want to put onto your SCSI controller. Ok, so the idea is that your IDE or ATAPI device is cheaper. Is it $100 cheaper, which is what it appears the converters cost? If so, is it really worth it to buy the drive, buy the converter, hook them up, and then hope if something goes wrong you can debug it? How many people out there have SCSI controllers that are crying for a device they can't find that is SCSI.

    Save your money for neon lights, or plexiglass, or whatever other case mod you were going to blow money on.

    • 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).
    • How many people out there have SCSI controllers that are crying for a device they can't find that is SCSI.
      I have to disagree there. Although CD Burners went in the other direction (SCSI first, IDE later), DVD Drives for IDE were widely available before any single good SCSI DVD drive came out.

      So, it's a nice option to have, but it's a seriously small market.

  • ISA Adapters (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrLudicrous ( 607375 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:25PM (#4931843) Homepage
    Screw SCSI adapaters. Make me something useful in the laboratory- like an ISA to PCI adapter. There are tons of ISA cards floating in science labs all throughout the world, and they become useless because when users upgrade their computers, there are no ISA slots.

    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?

    • you'd think a scientist would do some research before upgrading ;)
      • Decade-old computer go boom. Scientist need new computer. Scientist unavailable to buy computer with ISA slots. Scientist SOL, regardless of ``research'' invested before upgrading.

    • Re:ISA Adapters (Score:4, Informative)

      by nsample ( 261457 ) <nsample.stanford@edu> on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:43PM (#4931994) Homepage


      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.

      • ISA-USB (Score:3, Informative)

        by DrLudicrous ( 607375 )
        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.

        • In college we used a parallel-to-ISA converter (which was probably years and years old) so that we could do projects involving the ISA bus. I imagine there's a bunch of products like that around if you know where to look.
      • Well, in this case you need an external ISA expansion unit, that interfaces to the main system via a PCI card...
        I just did a google search using the terms isa expansion chassis, and the first several links looks promissing.

  • Doesn't make sense. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by _narf_ ( 21764 )
    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.
  • ...with integrated Babelfish-like translation on the chip so that all my data is written to a SCSI drive in Engrish.
  • 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?
      • 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)
    • 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.
    • 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.

      Dude, wait till I get to the LAN party with one of these. Inside my PC (don't worry, look through the window!) just behind the cold cathode is a 15,000 RPM SCSI drive, running beside my IDE RAID array of 320GB!

      As if my 30 fans weren't loud enough, now I have this SCSI screamer, which adds a really cool effect I like to call 'smoke' coming out the PSU.
    • 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?

      IDE drives are not just as fast, but they certainly are more expensive. In the last few years, they are also smaller.

      Reasons to buy SCSI drives for a desktop or workstation system:

      1) Speed OR
      2) Reliability OR
      3) Bragging rights (for those with friends that don't realize it's actually stupid to spend several times as much money for less than several times the benefit, less wealthy people).

  • Not the first (Score:2, Informative)

    by chiller2 ( 35804 )
    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 [acard.com] :)

  • Bottleneck? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Lt Razak ( 631189 )
    convert common ATAPI devices and IDE hard drives to high-speed SCSI devices

    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?

    • It might, not, for the 1/80th of a second it takes to dump the harddrive cache, because of it having an ATA step with a very hard to reach maximum speed.

  • Some links (Score:5, Informative)

    by bahwi ( 43111 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:29PM (#4931875)
    For those not familiar, or trying to respond to others in this forum and don't know what to say: =)

    IDE vs. SCSI [pcmech.com] article at PcMech.

    SCSI & IDE Overview [acc.umu.se] Good, informative, classroom materials for a university.

    IDE to SCSI Adaptor Review of the ACard ARS-2000FW [xlr8yourmac.com]

    ACARD Tech. [acard.com] - Makes SCSI to IDE converters.

  • Now you notice? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:30PM (#4931881)
    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.

  • Not sure on economics.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rainwalker ( 174354 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:32PM (#4931896)
    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?
    • MTBFs are around 100,000hrs for scsi, around half that for IDE. IDE drives are designed to be fast to spin up, wioth low viscosity fluid bearings, good for worksstations/home use. SCSI drives have high viscosity fluid bearings which gives less wear, but the spin up time is greater [hence "spinning up drives" msgs on controllers]

      also the scsi interface is technologically far superior, TCQ, 15 devices per channel, Connect/Disconnect etc

      so the controller on the drive actually does a lot of work, in that it sorts out out of order execution ITSELF, CRC etc etc.

      plus U320 is pretty neat ;-)
    • I wouldn't trust the MTBF numbers anyway. It's conceivable that manufacturers put SCSI interfaces on their prime drives, and IDE on the seconds, but who knows for sure?

      For the cost of the SCSI drive you quoted, plus the cost of a basic HBA, you could have two of the IDE drives and a 3ware raid controller. I'll take the latter. The SCSI tax is just too high for many apps. Does NCR make megabucks on SCSI?
    • It's simple really. PriceWatch is a TERRIBLE place to find SCSI devices. It's just that simple.
      • It's simple really. PriceWatch is a TERRIBLE place to find SCSI devices. It's just that simple.

        ok, I'll byte. What's a good place to shop for SCSI drives?

        • If I knew, I'd be happy to tell you. Unfortunatly, not many websites cater to the deal-seekers that use SCSI.

          I've had occasional luck with dealtime.com, but not consistently.

          If anyone finds a site, feel free to let me know.

  • What a coinkidink... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:32PM (#4931900) Homepage Journal
    I just contacted Addonics to get a returned materials authorization (RMA) number for my IDE to SCSI adaptor, since it would not work.

    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 /proc/scsi/scsi), but any attempt to actually access sectors on the drive locked the SCSI bus up solid.

    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.

    • Re:What a coinkidink... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Excuse me, who CREATED the SCSI standard?

      That would be NCR - the specific division was spun off as Symbios for a few years which was then purchased by LSI Logic. So, if you were thinking, maybe, uhm, perhaps, Adaptec, then you would be wrong.
    • Hooking it up to my Linux box's Adaptec controller let me get the drive info (cat /proc/scsi/scsi), but any attempt to actually access sectors on the drive locked the SCSI bus up solid.

      I think your problem was an insufficient goat's blood level in the SCSI terminator. Or haven't you heard about what it takes to make SCSI work properly?

      The drive itself works just fine on the Linux box's IDE, as well on my Firewire bay, so that exonerates the drive.

      So you already have Firewire, which is a damn decent way to talk to an external drive, but you wanted to hook an IDE drive up through a SCSI interface anyhow. (If you didn't want external, one drive per IDE bus works no worse than an IDE drive through a SCSI translator.)

      Masochist.

    • Um, SCSI is a direct descended of SASI, or Shugart Associates Systems Interface, which was created in response to IBM's mainframe needs. It was Shugart who submitted the original specs for the ANSI standard, IIRC.

      Therefore it would be Shugart Associates who created SCSI, not Adaptec.
  • These have certainly be mentioned here before and other manufacturers produce them as well, for example during discussions on SCSI vs IDE for RAID and so on. What is interesting (and good) is to actually have a review of the things.

    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.

  • IDE/ATAPI - SCSI (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:34PM (#4931911)
    • 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.

    • SCSI data is outdated (Score:2, Informative)

      by hoytt ( 469787 )
      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.
  • 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.
  • "This is a big deal if you have an adapter that downgrades all SCSI devices to the lowest speed on the bus."

    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.

  • case for external ide drives... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gimpboy ( 34912 ) <john.m.harrold@ g m a i l . c om> on Friday December 20, 2002 @03:54PM (#4932069) Homepage
    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.
    • How many devices would you want in this case? Remember IDE only supports 2 devices per cable, where SCSI can do 15.

      Most SCSI cards also have an external connector built in. I don't think I've ever seen an IDE controller with one.

      Of course you could just get a round IDE cable or two and fish them out through an expansion slot.
      • six or so. i know that each ide controller supports only two devices, but i would assume something has been done to address this. when i said a more _native_ solution, i was referring to something that delt with these issues. i dont have a need for high preformance, i just need the space. even if i had to run 3 cables out of my computer to an external box, i could do that.

        it just seems like someone should have addressed this. i could just use a scsi box and these adapters, but at $100 a piece, it seems rather expensive.
  • I love a review that starts off by parroting some incorrect preconception. There are plenty of good SCSI optical drives. Yamaha makes a 44/24/44 CD-RW, Plextor makes a 40/12/40 CD-RW. Pioneer makes 10X DVD-ROM drives, and there are also DVD-RAM and DVD-/+R for SCSI.
    • the scsi burners that exist arent as good for the most part as the ide burners. Liteon makes EXCELLENT burners for very low prices. You can get 48x24x48x liteon's for 50-60$. A scsi version of the liteon's would be very nice if the price wasnt horrific.

  • 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.

  • It has been my experience that SCA SCSI drives are available just as cheaply as their slower-performing IDE counterparts and often much cheaper, though usually not in the latest greatest capacity. Still, that's what RAID is for. SCA to HD68 (or whatever the hell that connector is called, SCSI3 we often call it) is usually another ten bucks.

    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?

  • 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.

  • http://www.datoptic.com/fwu2-ide.html

    http://www.usbgear.com/usa/item_420.html

    http://www.veriplus.com/pages/media-storage/UDA- 20 0.htm

    http://www.deltrontech.com/USB/USBIDE/U-IDE.htm

    http://www.indigita.com/products/prod_bridgeprod uc ts.htm

  • There is a good reason to use these: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bernz ( 181095 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @04:47PM (#4932437) Homepage
    It can be used well for RAID. In fact we're using them on a RAID device. See, 3ware [3ware.com] makes a really cool 12-port IDE RAID card (ata 133). It's quite fast and good. But it IS limited at 12 drives for a single volume. For home use, that's MORE than fine (2.8TB is fine for most people in a 4U). But some of us need more and more than that, some of us need the ability to expand.

    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've been using this for a long time (Score:3, Interesting)

    by neonstz ( 79215 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @04:49PM (#4932446) Homepage

    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.

  • 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.

    • Bah.

      Nobody who wants or needs the benefits of SCSI will bother with this halfway kludge. Seagate and the rest use their SCSI drives as their bread and butter. When Apple moved away from the SCSI world, there was no consumer market for SCSI, so the manufactures concentrated on making the best damned drives for the SCSI/Server market, while concentrating on making the biggest damned drives for the consumer marketplace.

      I would never put one of these in a server, and I'd never buy a SCSI card to use one of these in a workstation. This isn't going to have even a slight ripple on the SCSI market.
  • 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.
  • 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.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 20, 2002 @06:05PM (#4933031)
    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 are not new. Here are some others. (Score:4, Informative)

    by sparkeyjames ( 264526 ) on Friday December 20, 2002 @06:48PM (#4933312)
    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!

  • I can see the perfect use (Score:3, Interesting)

    by FueledByRamen ( 581784 ) <sabretooth@gmail.com> on Friday December 20, 2002 @09:02PM (#4934035)
    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)

  • HDD Performance (Score:2, Informative)

    by anoopiyer ( 153786 )

    Go to the TPC website [tpc.org] 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.

  • 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. ;)
    • Heh - Here, it is a Sun Ultra5 running Solaris 2.6 (development system for software that has to run under old Solaris).

      2.1GB IDE limitation. Even the Solaris 8, I think, only sees 8.4GB.

      And worse, it only runs the IDE interface in PIO mode. S-l-o-w.

      I theenk I try a couple of these with 120GB+ drives for the CVS storage and its backup, in external drive boxes. Already have the SCSI card for 18G of existing storage.

      I think you might be looking for the ATAPI-to-SCSI converter that Addonics has on their site though instead? Are DVD-RW drives ATAPI like CDROMs, or are they full EIDE/ATA-1XX now, and does it matter?

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