Petem95

Ive got a SCSI hard drive I want to use in my PC, so I understand I will be needing a PCI SCSI controller card and a SCSI cable to connect to the drive.

Is there only 1 type of SCSI cable, or do never SCSI devices need a cable with more pins or something?

Also I understand some controllers cannot be used with bootable devices? So no good for me as it will be the only HD in the PC, so I need a controller card?

GaryScoobNCBR

yep every scsi disk needs a controller card, make sure the card you get is compatible with your drive.

If your not running a server i would reccommend sticking with ide/sata drives whatever spec your motherboard can take.

Scooby Dooby Blue

I have an Acard SCSI -> IDE card in the shop that's been gathering dust for a while.
£10 delivered if you want it?
Cheaper than a PCI card would be.

Paul

stevencotton

That would remove the benefit of using SCSI, part of the reason being faster read/writes, depending on the disk

Fuchsrohre

scsi is lovely , but more expensive than your IDE or SATA stuff

not just for servers - for the power hungry affluent user too!

Scooby Dooby Blue

I thought the benefit of scsi drives was mainly their ability to spool at 15000rpm, nothing to do with bandwidth.
Would an IDE channel not be able to cope with the data bursts from a scsi drive?

ScoobyDoo555

used to use it for my Mac's Protools setup absolutely brilliant for hard-disk audio. Really quick.

also use it for all of my Akai, Emu and Kurzweil samplers (Music instruments) and Zip/Jaz drives etc

Love it. Only used it on one PC - an adaptec SCSI card to connect the Akai to a piece of audio editing software

Now using SATA.

Dan

jpor

iTrader: (1)

To answer your questions:

Yes you will need a SCSI Host Controller card. And possibly a Terminator plug to put on the end of the SCSI cable if the Hard drive does not have in-built Termination. Yes SCSI devices need some setting up also as you normally have to give each device on the cable an ID number, normally set on the HDD via jumpers.

Yes you will need a cable but this depends what type of SCSI Hard Drive you own. There are numerous SCSI types. SCSI 1,2,3 Ultra, wide, ultra-wide etc.. SCSI 1 & 2 is the first SCSI that came out and the slowest means of data transfer, this uses a 50-pin cable (A bit like the IDE cable but has 10 more holes in the cable). SCSI 3 uses a different type of cable. The differences start to show if you have a SCSI 2 WIDE device as you need a cable that has 64-pin connection and the connector is d-shaped.

Some cheap SCSI cards don't have much functionality. You really need a host controller that has it's own BIOS on the card for which you can configure your devices. Also the PC BIOS may need it's boot order configuring so it can boot from SCSI. This can normally be found on Adaptec SCSI cards.

I bet you wish you never asked now?

Fuchsrohre

Tagged Command Queing

...whcih is nice! ;-)