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IDE to SCSI Converters? 108

Posted by Cliff 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?"
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IDE to SCSI Converters? More

IDE to SCSI Converters?

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  • Why? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Why would I pay >100$ to connect an IDE disk to an expensive controller when I could just use a simple cable and connect it directly to the controller I already have?

    • I could just use a simple cable and connect it directly to the controller I already have?

      What if I want to use more than two CD drives (DVD-ROM and CD-RW) and two hard drives (swap and /home)? Most motherboards contain only two ATA connectors, each of which can support up to two drives (id 0 and 1).

    • Can't see this being anything more than a niche device. If you don't have any more PCI slots for extra IDE controllers you probably don't have any more case room for extra drives either.

      Personally I'd just use a reasonable size 10k SCSI drive to boot off of and then use the cheaper bigger IDE drives to mount /home and other storage directories.

  • Great Deal (Score:2, Funny)

    by 0x20 ( 546659 )
    Yes, I'm so tired of paying a premium for SCSI drives with half the capacity, etc. I'd much rather pay $100 each to convert my IDE drives to low-quality, high seek-time SCSI drives.

  • Yeah, right... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by joto ( 134244 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @07:26AM (#4379637)
    which convert common ATAPI devices and IDE hard drives to high-speed SCSI devices

    Yeah, right. By putting my old IDE disk in this controller it will be faster? Right.

    Not that it couldn't be useful, but this is marketroid speak at its worst...


    • Yeah, right. By putting my old IDE disk in this controller it will be faster? Right.

      Sure!!! You'll probably get this cool little sticker that say "Fast Ultra-Wide SCSI" to put on your old hard drive over the "damn slow ide" sticker that's already there. That'll speed things up right away......or not

      • Re:Yeah, right... (Score:4, Funny)

        by Tower ( 37395 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @10:23AM (#4380336)
        Yeah, add that, a "Type-R" sticker, a couple pounds of vinyl tape, a glass pack muffler for your CPU fan, and I bet your computer will be faster than ever...
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • I think you've confused ATA and SCSI with bus and port attachments, respectively. Both ATA and SCSI use shared parallel buses to connect devices to the controller. Also, multiple SCSI devices on the same bus can and will saturate the bus, specially if you have many 15Krpm drives with insanely high transfer speeds per spindle. ATA's limitation of being able to perform one transaction at a time is independent of it using a shared bus design.

            • Re:Yeah, right... (Score:1, Interesting)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Good point. Here's a better one, though. If you're using converted IDE drives on your SCSI Bus, you won't saturate the pipeline. You will, however, be able to simultanously access 7 devices.
    • And for the cost of one cheap single channel SCSI card I can fit 15 180GB hd's for 2.7Tb of slow but still plenty of data.
      Or, I can buy 4 IDE cards and get the same.

      4 slots or one?

      We could spend a little more and get a dual channel SCSI card, 30@180Gb, 5.4Tb of slow storage. Know where I can find a motherboard with 8 PCI slots?

    • Re:Yeah, right... (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      i bet you'll find a motherboard with 8 PCI slots at the same place you'll find a case that will hold 30 hard drives
    • You wouldn't speed up a single drive. If you have 2 IDE drives on one cable then they are sharing ata100/133/etc. SCSI controller could give you more overall speed if you have several drives.This could be a nice solution for specific applications.

      I'd prefer to buy a 12 drive 3Ware [3ware.com] IDE RAID card and be done with it. They are now shipping Serial ATA RAID controllers. Mmmmmm!!
      • These 3ware people are claiming "Greater than 180MB/sec on reads" over a 133MB/sec link? Sure, THAT'S gonna happen. I was intruiged until I started reading the descriptions.

        Regards, Guspaz.
        • Every drive is on its own channel. Take ATA133 times 12 channels and you won't have too hard of time thinking that you can do 180MB/sec sustained. Especially since they are using hardware RAID and 64bit PCI cards. Dig a little deeper and you will see these are great products.

          ATA133 drives might burst and hit 133mb/sec from time to time but sustained is more like 12-16MB/sec.
    • Well... actually it CAN be faster. If the IDE controller is the bottleneck and your HDD's are really fast.

      And I remember having heard that IDE cannot address devices simultaneously, while SCSI can. (I'm not sure about this one, I'm not a hardware guy)

  • A sensible use senario ... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Boiotos ( 139179 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @07:40AM (#4379666) Homepage
    of the ATAPI/IDE to SCSI converter might be when one a) already has a SCSI controller and b) wants to add many additional ATAPI devices to the machine. A SCSI chain can comprise many more devices than your usual 2 and 2 on an IDE controller. Furthermore, one might hope that the SCSI converter would keep the ATAPI/IDE device nicely saturated regardless of system activity. Perhaps a CD copying station would benefit from this arrangement.

    Nevertheless, when it comes to hard drives, the basic performance of the drive itself will be a limiting factor. I doubt your IDE drive will suddenly get a boost in performance, though it would be neat to see some Bonnie++ results to confirm this.

    As for the SCSI controller, does anyone have any experience with these? Its a fair bit cheaper than the equivalent Adaptec model [adaptec.com]. After putting SCSI in my Linux workstation at work, I'm hooked on it: what's not to like about cutting compile times by 50%? Maybe I could get SCSI at home if this controller is the real deal.

    • what's not to like about cutting compile times by 50%?

      Increasing drive costs by 500% (or more)
    • Their stuff is always priced about twice as high as the competition. I just bought a brand-new LSI Logic 21040 controller, one channel of Ultra160 and one of Ultra for like $120, and it's even a 64-bit PCI card!
    • After putting SCSI in my Linux workstation at work, I'm hooked on it: what's not to like about cutting compile times by 50%?

      Cutting compile times? More like cutting VM disk-swap times! Tell your boss Linux can use more than 8 Mb of RAM these days! Unless all that disk thrashing is the only thing keeping you awake while you wait for your kernel to recompile...
    • I've seen these before, but haven't seen enough to convince met that it is useful.

      Things they I think would be good are tagged command queueing, getting an IRQ or two back from my ide controllers, especially when I am already using a SCSI controller.

      I'm not sure whether SCSI bus contention will be better or worse than IDE master/slave contention when I want to do raid 0+1 over 4 drives.

      And then there is the whole Serial ATA thing, coming soon to a store near me.

      If I'd seen these converters a few years ago, and they were a reasonable price, then they would have been worth the investment. Now SATA is added to the mix.
  • 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.
    <SARCASM> Oh, I didn't know that SCSI is OS dependent. Sigh, so I can't use it with NetBSD, right? </SARCASM>
    Why do they mention the OS at all? If it doesn't work on all OSes which support SCSI out of the box they must have done something horrible wrong which violates SCSI standards.
    • I've used Addonics converters on VAXstation SCSI ports under many versions of VMS going back to 5.5, and they worked to drive both hard drives and CD-R's. There was the limitation that booting from hard drives larger than 1Gbytes on a VAXStation 3100/30 isn't supported, but that's the computer's firmware, not Addonics' fault.

      So they do work on other brands, just not necessarily guaranteed to work.

    • Mentioning an OS is simply to make tech supports life easier. When someone rings up and says they are having problems getting the adaptor to work an old unix box, the tech support department can turn around and say "we don't support that". If someone says they can't get it to work on a generic PC with an adaptec scsi controller, then the tech support bod can at least give them some pointers. "Have you checked the termination" etc.

      Bob.
    • I am not sure, but I would suggest that the reason they mention the OS at all, is that the people that might actually buy these products might be concerned about what OS it is compatible with.

      I can't see too many technically savvy people buying these. The guy that is looking for something to soup up his computer, and acutally asks the guys at Best Buy (that don't work on commission, so feel free to ask questions) for advice.
    • Why do they mention the OS at all? If it doesn't work on all OSes which support SCSI out of the box they must have done something horrible wrong which violates SCSI standards

      hehe, like that Linksys WAP11 Access Point I just bought .. which according to all the web shops in the UK, requires Win98/XP/2k. Oh, and 100mb of hard-drive space.

  • Too expensive (Score:2, Insightful)

    by samjam ( 256347 )
    at $100 a pop?

    I'm not going to bother to convert "just one" drive, I'll want to buy a few, but no way am I spending $400 on that.

    $50 is more like it and more within the impulse purchase range for interest users.

    I'd pay $100 if each device supported multiple and could control more than one IDE devices (and no it doesn't have to be IDE master/slave, but I wouldn't object)

    I'll wait till the price comes down I think, if IDE hasn't moved over to out-of-order command completion by then. If it has then I won't need to bother at all.

    Sam

    • Re:Too expensive (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Eugene ( 6671 )
      for the people who has SCSI already, it's a cheap way to add extra storage, or RAID.. $100 for the converter, $150 for 120GB 8MB cache WD drive.. not too bad. it's cheap to build a large RAID array this way (if you don't mind the performance compare to a 15K rpm storage array)

  • Connector:
    Ultra160 LVD internal connector,
    Ultra160 LVD external connector
    Support Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, Linux
    Dimension (W x D x H) -
    1 year warranty

    Scary

  • You know, if it wasn't for the 100$ adapter price I would be all over this like stank on a monkey.
    My system is based on a Tyan Thunder K7. with the SCSI. Booting is done off of an 18Gb 15k rpm Cheetah. And mass storage via a 120Gb Maxtor.
    It'd be nice indeed to keeep the IDE channels for burner and dvd drive. While adding copious ammounts of storage into the 29 available slots on the SCSI.

    Let's see, 300$ for a 180Gb, 100$ for the Adaptor. 5.2 Terabytes at the cost of 116k.
    I don't know where in the hell I'm going to find a case to happily hold 30hd's though.

    Though.. 114$ for a 100Gb, plus adaptor, I could reach a terabyte for a mear 2 grand. As an added feature both 1Tb and 5.2Tb are *without* the addition of extra cards.

    What I wouldn't do for a job.

    • While adding copious ammounts of storage into the 29 available slots on the SCSI.

      Yeah, and watch your performance fly out the window. This is another case of just cause you can, doesn't mean you should! Yes you can put 15 15K drives on one scsi controller, but if you want ANY sort of performance I'd limit it to about 6 drives per controller. On some raw disk benchmarks I did awhile back I found that a single 10K U160 drive having a 160 chain all to itself maxes out at around 40MB/s throughput. Well do the math, in THEORY 4 10K drives could fill a U160 chain. Now imagine having 15 or those suckers hammering away at the bus.

    • Re:Curiosity. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Ashurbanipal ( 578639 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @11:29AM (#4380693)
      I don't know where in the hell I'm going to find a case to happily hold 30hd's though.


      I've been running lots of SCSI drives under linux for a long time now. I started out with a single Adaptec SCSI controller, changed over to a pair of DPTs, then went back to Adaptec when I figured out that the Adaptec boards need lots of extra cooling. The drives have been scavenged from dumpsters of local companies; over the last eight years the insatiable corporate hunger for server disk space has driven them to denser platters, so they toss out the older 1 and 2 GB drives.

      Then a friend gave me a case of 9 GB IBM ultra-SCSI drives (new, unused) he got as a going-away prezzie when the dot-bomb he worked for collapsed. Like you, I couldn't figure out how to case 'em.

      Then I went to the local Mega-Mart (Where Shopping Is A Baffling Ordeal (tm!) ) and got some of that heavily perforated sheet metal that people pop-rivet to their screen doors to keep dogs from busting them. It comes in several patterns; if you choose carefully, you can get something that folds easily along straight lines, and has holes that line up reasonably well with hard drive mounting points.

      I use tin snips and old case screws to make what I call "drive blocks", which are seven drives sitting vertically separated by half-inch gaps. I attach old screen-door handles to the top middle, and I make power cables with one female and eight male connectors. I have a bunch of large surplus 12 vdc fans that are ganged together two fans per power connector, and I repin them from 12v to 5v and attach them so they blow through the slots in the drive blocks.

      Nowadays I am running linux soft RAID (RAID 5 across six drives with one spare, except for the boot partition which is just mirrored) on two drive blocks. I have CPU coolers on the Adaptec controllers, though, because they run so damn hot.

      Unbelievably fast disk storage, and I have all the drive LEDs hooked up so it looks really cool when you do a large file copy or an fsck. The blocks sit happily on any flat surface, with their own small AT-style power supply, connected by SCSI and a ground wire to the rest of the server.
      • The closest I've come is buying a decent sized case, no motherboard, and putting a bunch of drivers in it, some with 5.25 -> 3.5 adapters on, and buying an internal 50ping to external honda adapter to run an extension cable between the two cases. Looks like two computers under the desk.

  • Acard has these and I got mine alot cheaper (Score:3, Informative)

    by eht ( 8912 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @08:46AM (#4379862)
    acard [acard.com]

    their cards work fine for both atapi and ide in one card, they even have cards for 50 and 68 pin, plus lvd

    at memorylabs for 74$ us [memorylabs.net]

    macena 61.90$ us [emaxasp.com]

    works like a charm, and is great for when you don't want to pay the outrageous prices they charge for scsi 40x burners for your older sun system, at least that's why my roommate wanted one

    • I've had one too for almost a couple years now. It has been 100% solid and transparent. Set the ID and termination jumpers, plug it in and forget it.

      I got it because my new (at the time) WD400 40 gig drive wouldn't play nice with the IDE bus on that motherboard. I already had a SCSI controller for my CD-ROM & CDR, so I gave it a shot. Only $70 from Microland at the time. It's not blazing fast, but neither is my SCSI card. It also allowed me to let my boot drive and Zip drive have the primary and secondary IDE busses to themselves. Everything can run in parallel in complete harmony.


      ...Sean.

  • Where is SpamAssassin for Slashdot when I need it?
  • We use synetic.net's boxes of ide discs with scsi coming out the back. Work like a dream :)

  • SCA Version? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GoRK ( 10018 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @10:04AM (#4380230) Homepage Journal
    I think it would be pretty smooth if they also offered this IDE-SCSI converter in an SCA version. I'd pick up three just to try them out!
    • How well do you think an sca version would work? Most computers I have that use sca drives barely fit in now, with an adapter on a hard drive at the end, I would think there is no way you could fit it in (at least the case with my ultra 1's and e450 wouldnt be able to hold them)

  • Tagged command queueing and latency (Score:3, Informative)

    by red_dragon ( 1761 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @10:04AM (#4380233) Homepage

    The page doesn't mention anything about tagged command queueing. SCSI drives can receive multiple commands from the controller simultaneously and return the results in whatever order they think is the fastest at that moment. ATA cannot do this, and this is a reason why SCSI usually 'seems' to be faster than ATA. Then there's the issue of latency; the converter would necessarily take some time to convert the commands between SCSI and ATA. Even with ATA/133, I suspect that an ATA drive connected to a SCSI bus using this converter will be much slower than a native SCSI drive. And, at USD$99, it cancels out any savings that you might get from buying an ATA drive over a SCSI one. It'd be better, though, if the converter allowed the user to connect two ATA drives simultaneously, instead of having to use one converter per drive.

    • Also the fact that you can't get IDE harddrives faster than 7200rpm might be a bit of a bottleneck. That's one thing that's blown me away, usually rotation increases in SCSI drives a few months later make it into the IDE market. But 10K SCSI drives have been around forever, we now even have 15K drives. Does anyone know why IDE drives have been stuck at 7200rpm forever?? Having an ATA266, or whatever the latest new bus speed will be, would be pretty pointless if the drives are still spining at 7200.
      • I think it's diminishing returns. If I remember my kinematics & machine design classes, bearing stress goes up as the 4th power of the the rotational speed. If that's correct the spindle bearing and case in a 10000 rpm drive needs to be 272% stronger than the same parts in a 7200 rpm drive. For the jump from 7200 to 15000 rpm the increase is 1784%. The overall performance gains for those speed increases are 38% (7200 - 10000) and 108% (7200 - 15000). The market's probably not willing to pay such a great cost for such a small gain.

        Ecks

      • My guess is that 15Krpm drives are simply more expensive to manufacture, and not that there's any inherent quality in ATA drives that keep them from achieving rotational speeds higher than 7200rpm. ATA drives are sold at cut-throat profit margins, so anything that'd make them cost less to make will help the bottom line. SCSI drives command a higher price, thus covering the cost of development, manufacturing, and quality assurance.

        As you might have noticed, the page for the IDE-SCSI converter did not provide any technical reasons for why one would want to put an ATA drive on a SCSI bus. Their only valid reason is cost; large-capacity SCSI drives do exist, like the 146GB Seagate ST3146807LW, contrary to their implied claim when they ask "Tired of paying a premium for a SCSI hard drive for only half the storage capacity of an IDE hard drive?".

    • goes back as far as the ibm 14gxp series, which has to be 6-7 years ago.

      look at the sources for the ata controllers in your os

  • Autostart (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bob_jordan ( 39836 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @10:11AM (#4380266)
    Most scsi drives have a jumper you can set so they start when they receive a scsi start command from the controller. You configure the controller to send scsi starts to the drives in a sensable way. This way your 14 drives don't try to spin up at the same time and blow up your power supply. Remember it takes much less power to keep the platters spinning then it does to start them spinning. Most IDE drives just power up the moment you add power to them. A tower of 14 180 gig drives is impressive but a tower of 14 180 gig drives all trying to spin up at the same time would probably melt most server grade power supplies.

    Any ideas how they get around this?

    Bob.
    • My guess: They don't. Anyone using that many drives will either have a) bought an ATAPI RAID controller (like the awesome ones from 3ware) or b) have gone with SCSI drives from the start. B's the more likely choice.

      As an aside, I have a machine with dual Athlon XP 2200+'s, all the expansion slots filled, three very large DDR DIMMs, and 6 ATA133 Maxtor drives hooked up in one system next to my desk. The drives are all set to master, so they all spin up at the same time (slaves wait a moment before spinning up). It not only sounds cool, but works just fine. The power supply is a 500W Enermax (maybe it's 530 or 560, I forget - it's pretty nice, though). It's not melted, nor do I expect it to ever do so. I could add another 6 drives in slave mode and still not worry about the supply dying, IMHO.
    • Have you seen those Monster Cable brand compacitors around.

      They are made to supply 12 volts at high amps to car amplifiers.

      Just hook one of these to your 12v line between your hard drives and your power supply.
      • Great. Now we've got hard drives AND capacitors to spin/charge up when you hit the power button.

        Why don't we just connect up a space heater to the 12v lines to drag them down further?
        • I think that some people are. A system with newer P4 chips and a fairly high-end graphics card will also do that job nicely, no space heater needed :-)

          As for the capacity, I think you could feed it from passive power (something with a trickle feed before the computer comes on) so that it's partly charged before the computer comes on, that way it will be charged and ready before the drives rev up.
          • Oddly enough, my P4/2.4 runs much cooler than my previous p3/700

            The 3ware escalade series supports delayed startup automatically if the drive supports it(can't think of any offhand that do though)

    • Re:Autostart (Score:2, Informative)

      by Cadderly ( 530144 )
      well it is possible to spin down/up a IDE drive, I think that holding a couple of lines down on the IDE connector will probebly do this. So the convertor will spin up the drive when it is called to do so, just like a native SCSI drive

    • Anyone want to search/link to it?

    • I now collect old power supplies and gang them together using a 12v DPDT relay(s), from radio shack. The "slave" power supplies use 12v from the "main" ps to trigger the relays. This allows you to power up and down as many power supplies as you need. All power supplies controlled by a single switch.

  • As long as you pay for it with your Visa card. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Glonoinha ( 587375 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @10:34AM (#4380391) Journal
    Two 80G IDE hard drives : $200.
    Two ATAPI-SCSI adapters : $200.
    A new SCSI controller : $170.
    Time spent telling us about it on /. : $4
    Benchmarking the upgraded system and learning you took a 9% performance hit : Priceless.

  • There also seem to be many devices very similar to this that let you add big+cheap ATA drives to a Firewire bus. Anyone using them?

    I'm considering one or the other for next year's revamped home server, where the main considerations are capacity (and ease of adding more and more capacity later) and redundancy, rather than speed. It seems like adding more drives onto a bus that supports a lot of devices (not to mention that they can be external devices), would be much less headache-inducing than trying to add more ATA cards (and trying to fit more drives into a computer case).

    But I haven't actually done it yet. Any thoughts?

    • Has anyone tried these devices out?

      How well do they work?

      Do they decrease the CPU load?
    • I have a 75GB hard drive I have connected to my Linux video editing machine and a DVD-RW drive that I switch between the same Linux machine and a Windows machine. The drives work fine and I have used some benchmarch to show over 16MB/s to the hard drive, but that was with the 2.4.7 kernel.

      The problems I have seen are that I cannot use my camcorder and a drive on IEEE 1394 simultaneously, and there are cases, possibly related to the first problem, where I have to reboot before I can use a drive again. It doesn't happen often, though, so I haven't even tried to fix it.

      In case you are interested, Fire wire direct [firewiredirect.com] sells boxes that take multiple drives and gives them a IEEE 1394 connection. FYI: I'm using one of their interface cards and single drive enclosures, but I don't work for them.

    • I have yet to see any FireWire drives that are anything but IDE drives with an IDE to FireWire converter chip. The only difference between a pre-packaged FireWire drive and an IDE-FireWire enclosure is that you don't void the warranty if you open the latter.

      FireWire was flakey in Win2k before one of the service packs, but it's getting better. It's still marked "experimental" in the Linux kernel, and I've only just started trying it out.

      I don't know what OS your server runs, but it sounds like FireWire would be good for you if it works with your setup ;-)

  • INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS!!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Iconoclast ( 24795 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @12:00PM (#4380939)
    How safe are these products?

    Be warned!!! These products are INCREDBILY DANGEROUS!!

    These converters can cause Spontaneous Incinerations, Plague, Pestilince and Famine, Birth Defects, Sour Milk, Global Thermonuclear Annihilation, Premature Baldness, Tire Sidewall Blowout, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Acid Reflux Disease, Parachute Deployment Malfunction, O-Ring Seal Degredation, Spurious Airbag Inflation, Mass Hallucinations, Alien Invasion, Asteroid Impact, Genetic Mutations, and Loss of Balance to the Force!

    • Also, you really should read the Addonics EULA:

      You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble IDE-SCSI Converter, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.

      You agree that you will not export or re-export IDE-SCSI Converter to any country, person, entity or end user subject to U.S.A. export restrictions. Restricted countries currently include, but are not necessarily limited to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. You warrant and represent that neither the U.S.A. Bureau of Export Administration nor any other federal agency has suspended, revoked or denied your export privileges.

      IDE-SCSI Converter technology is not fault tolerant and is not designed, manufactured, or intended for use or resale as online control equipment in hazardous environments requiring fail-safe performance, such as in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, air traffic control, direct life support machines or weapons systems, in which the failure of IDE-SCSI Converter technology could lead directly to death, personal injury, or severe physical or environmental damage.

      Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to IDE-SCSI Converter.

      Caution: IDE-SCSI Converter may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.

      IDE-SCSI Converter contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.

      Do not use IDE-SCSI Converter on concrete.

      Discontinue use of IDE-SCSI Converter if any of the following occurs:

      * Itching
      * Vertigo
      * Dizziness
      * Tingling in extremities
      * Loss of balance or coordination
      * Slurred speech
      * Temporary Blindness
      * Profuse sweating
      * Heart Palpitations

      If IDE-SCSI Converter begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.

      IDE-SCSI Converter may stick to certain types of skin.

      When not in use, IDE-SCSI Converter should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration.

      Failure to do so relieves the makers of IDE-SCSI Converter, Addonics Incorporated, and its parent company Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.

      Ingredients of IDE-SCSI Converter include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.

      IDE-SCSI Converter has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.

      Do not taunt IDE-SCSI Converter.
    • In some rare cases death.
    • In a related story, Robert Novak [slashdot.org] of Pets Warehouse has been hired to represent Addonics Technologies, Inc. [addonics.com] in a lawsuit against Slashdot posters for speaking out against their new IDE-SCSI and ATAPI-SCSI converters. Among those being prosecuted is a Slashdot member known as "The Iconoclast" for falsely claiming that the products cause, among other things, "Plague, Pestilince and Famine." No word from God yet on whether or not the Four Horsemen are coming and the Apocalypse is truly upon us.
  • This is what I am waiting for hot-swapable, plug and play Serial ATA.

    This has been in the workls for a long time, but there are some actual products coming to market this year.

    Tom's has a good story. Serial ATA [tomshardware.com]

    The features in brief:

    150 MByte/s maximum transfer rate (300/600 MByte/s envisioned for the future)
    Hot-plugging capability
    Two power saving modes: partial and slumber
    Overlapping (commands)
    Tagged command queueing
    Seven-wire data cable. Connectors measure just 8 mm wide.

    • This is what I am waiting for hot-swapable, plug and play Serial ATA.

      A few years ago, Apple Computer invented the next best thing: a hot-swappable, plug-and-play serial SCSI-protocol connection running at 400 Mbps. It's called a FireWire(tm) [apple.com] brand IEEE 1394 peripheral network.

      If you just want hot-swappable ATA, look into PCMCIA and its smaller-form-factor brother CompactFlash.

      • Too bad Apple still uses IDE hard drives. FireWire is not nor was it ever intended to be a device interconnect for high speed storage drives.

        You will note Serial ATA is 150 MBps, not Mbps. B = bytes. b = bits. Hard drives are much faster than anything an extral bus can provide, thus the reason it is not used to primary hard disks. There are eight bits in a byte remember. Serial ATA is 1200 Mbps while Firewire is 400. Serial ATA also scales to even faster speeds much more easily with 300 megabytes per second around the corner.

        And CompactFlash? PCMCIA? What planet are you living on? I use CompactFlash on my PDA. When the guy said Hot Swappable, he wasn't talking about removing a compact flash card, he was talking about swapping out a defective drive in a RAID array...

        I also absolutely guarantee that when Serial ATA is fully available, Apple we be amongst the first companies to use it. They have been waiting for this ever since SCSI's demise as a desktop product. They use IDE crap because they have no choice if they want to make a profit. Apple also did not invent Firewire, it was a standard ratified by the IEEE. Thus, the reason it is called IEEE 1394. It is also completely unrelated to SCSI in every way, and not intended to serve as a replacement for it.

        Apple people really ARE dumb.

        • Serial ATA is 1200 Mbps while Firewire is 400

          Apparently FireWire is up to 800 mbps [macworld.com] now. Can Serial ATA do device-to-device transfers without CPU intervention? If not, cut your bandwidth in half.

          Apple also did not invent Firewire, it was a standard ratified by the IEEE. Thus, the reason it is called IEEE 1394.

          Apple invented FireWire and submitted it to IEEE. What makes you think they didn't? From the page I linked to [apple.com]:

          Apple invented FireWire in the mid-90s and shepherded it to become the established cross-platform industry standard IEEE 1394. FireWire is a high-speed serial input/output technology for connecting digital devices such as digital camcorders and cameras to desktop and portable computers.

  • IDE drives with SCSI like features (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Drakino ( 10965 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @02:07PM (#4382107) Journal
    The new line of IBM drives (I thought they got out, but apparently not) offer features like 8mb cache, and tag command queuing. While SCSI will still beat IDE in some way or another, IDE is getting closer.

    As everyone else has said though, shoehorning IDE into SCSI won't change much. But, it does have one advantage that I can see. It might be cheeper to get one of these converters for an old SCSI system, like older Macs.

  • nothing new (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Eugene ( 6671 )
    I have been using similar product for almost a year now.. from Acard Technology [acard.com] they are the one that produce the chipset for Addonics I think. I don't have any problem with it so far.

  • OK this is slightly OT: Given the low cost of IDE drives today I was wondering if it would make sense to make an adapter that would make a large IDE drive (or array of drives) look like a SCSI DDS DAT drive.

    This way, it would be transparent to the server and could use any backup solution that would write to DDS, but it would be faster, cheaper and more reliable* for routine backups. Archival would still go to tape.

    (* we seem to have run into a bad spell where even new tapes seem to be getting jammed in our DDS drives/autoloaders)

    Anyone have any other suggestions for using IDE drives to back up NT/Exchange servers?

    Balam

    • SAMBA (Score:1)

      by qurob ( 543434 )

      Grab a cheap PC, stick some 80GB or 120GB drives in it....

      Use Windows Explorer or a batch file on your NT/2000 Server....simply copy your server drives to \\mySambaServer\Backup

      • Thanks, been well aware of samba since the early days. In fact that's what got me into linux in the first place around 1994 when I finally gave up on a WfWG 3.1x "server" and replaced it with Slackware ... I've also recently deployed two samba 2.2.x servers for quick & dirty jobs in my current job.

        So, why not samba for this application?

        • We still do full back ups every night (~50-100G) and don't want that clogging up our network
        • We have fairly complex ACLs in some cases that don't map over to unix security all that well
        • We have two MS Exchange 5.5 servers on NT4 with over 30G of data between them that can only be backed up using NTBACKUP or Backup Exec, and these like to talk to SCSI drives*...
        I saw some interesting stuff regarding SCSI target mode on Google when I was researching this a while ago, but it doesn't seem ready for prime time and may require real SCSI devices... Particulary this [virtualscsi.com] seems neat, but runs only on Windows, so there goes cheap...

        *(BE, might be able to write to a network share, I haven't tried).

        Balam

        • NTBackup can use files (including network) as target media.

          Not sure i trust it to backup exchange correctly (ie. with something that actually restores) though.

          For exchange backup you can also either dimount mailstore and copy db and transaction log files or use the exmerge tool (can run in batch mode from scripts or scheduler) to export mailboxes to .pst files which can then be backed up like normal files.

          • Now we're diverging further OT.

            I've looked, but never found a way to have NT4's NTBACKUP dump to anything but a tape drive. How do you set that up? (Windows 2000 ntbackup is different, since it's a stripped down version of Backup Exec.)

            Personally, I don't like Exchange backup period. Exmerge is really useful, but still doesn't give you the ability to restore to where you were, since you lose single instance file storage when you re-import the PST to Exchange.

            And I've heard far more horror stories restoring Exchange stores from "offline" (i.e. file level) backups than "online" (i.e. ntbackup) backups.

            Balam
            • My bad - I'm thinking of NTbackup on 2000. Been a long while (in IT time) since I used it on NT4 and I can't remember what that version did. In some ways 2000 is worse as exchange becomes tightly integrated with active directory and getting email back after you've lost AD is horror story even if you have a workign exchange backup.

              I know about loss of single-instance storage with psts, but after several days of crashed drives, mysteriously unreadable backups, broken tape drives, etc. it is a great relief to just give a pst to each user and say "there's your old mail". that's with tens of users though, obviously with hundreds or more it may be a different story.

        • Don't wanna be picky, but...

          We still do full back ups every night (~50-100G) and don't want that clogging up our network

          Why not stick a couple of extra network adaptors in the boxes, and run a seperate network for it then? You could even go Gigabit ethernet over copper for next to nothing.
          Of course if you rsynced instead it wouldn't touch your network utilisation, but I don't know how well that fits in with your other software, and my second point.

          We have fairly complex ACLs in some cases that don't map over to unix security all that well
          So don't "map" it at all then, use XFS as your underlying FS and use a recent version of samba, it'll keep all your ACLs intact.

          Your third point I don't know about so I'll decline to comment.

    • FYI - backup to hard drive / UNC path / etc.. Ultrabac.com

  • The best of both worlds (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Thursday October 03, 2002 @06:27PM (#4383927) Homepage
    The speed of SCSI coupled with the unreliability of IDE. Sounds like a winner.

    Seriously, you're not going to be using this in a five-nines server. But this device does have its place on desktops.

    You can get a 60GB IDE drive for around a hundred bucks. Add this converter and you've got a 60GB SCSI drive for two hundred. True SCSI drives of that size are around $500.

    Sure, you are losing reliability (and maybe some performance) over native SCSI drives, but what you gain is the ability to have more than three drives in a system (the fourth being your CD-ROM in an IDE system) and use cheaper drives on a decent hardware RAID array on a budget not backed by corporate pockets.

    Some in this forum will bring up IDE raid adapters... they are almost all crap (Promise cards have given me nothing but trouble -- Adaptec's AAR-2400A is the best I've found).

    Now it remains to be seen how reliable this controller is, but if it works well, I think it will be A Good Thing.
  • If you're thinking of buying one of these cards then you better have a foolproof backup system and make regular (ie, daily) backups.

    Here's why.

    If you have an IDE hard drive on an IDE controller and the controller fails at a critical juncture then all you have to need to do to get to your data is put the drive in another controller (perhaps in the same machine, perhaps in another one). Similarly if you have a SCSI drive on a SCSI controller.

    But if you have an IDE drive attached to an IDE to SCSI converter on a SCSI controller, how do you get to your data quickly if your converter dies on you?

    Sure, you can get a new converter card in a couple of days (assuming that you have the cash to buy a replacement, or if Addonics/whoever will courier an advanced warranty replacement to you - and that the cards are still available) but if you need your data now then you're up shit creek without a paddle.

    And the worst part is that, by trying to save a few pennies, you're the one who put yourself in this situation.

    Granted, there are a few situations where putting an IDE drive on a SCSI controller is a workable solution (the Apple crowd have been doing it for a while with some success) but before you make the commitment shouldn't you seriously examine whether or not it's neccessary and/or safe?

    Most new motherboards have can support up to eight IDE devices. Add a third party controller or two - available from Adaptec, Promise, etc -and you can ramp that eight up to 16 or more. And external IDE drives are available too. So what does adding your IDE devices to your SCSI controller bring to the party?
    • If you have all SCSI, and a drive dies on you, don't expect the local CompUSA or Staples to suddenly have a huge SCSI selection available.

      Either way, you wait.

      What I'm saying is, you should always have a backup system in place for critical systems, important data, saved games, your family from the Sims, etc...

      Adding an extra converter shouldn't make a difference.
      • If you have all SCSI, and a drive dies on you, don't expect the local CompUSA or Staples to suddenly have a huge SCSI selection available.

        Either way, you wait.

        While I don't expect to be able to pick up a SCSI drive locally as readily as I would an IDE one, and thus can see your point, I think you might have missed my one.

        In a regular drive-controller relationship, then there are two things that can go wrong: the drive or the controller. If the drive dies then (unless it's part of a RAID array or has recently been backed up) then you've lost some, perhaps all of your data. If the controller dies then your data is probably OK.

        Either way, the solution is simple: replace the faulty part, which will always be readily available (for the foreseeable future). Problem solved.

        But in a drive-converter-controller set-up there's an additional layer of compexity: a third device that can go wrong.

        If your controller has failed then the solution may not be as simple: if the make and model of the faulty component is still available then you'll probably be OK but what happens if it isn't?

        Let's face it, at the moment you'd be lucky if you can buy any kind of device that's more than two years old from the original manufacturer. That's fine when you're talking about a printer, scanner or a graphics card but it's a problem when you're talking about a component that's vital to your data integrity.

        Who knows, perhaps these devices are easily interchangeable and that, at a pinch, you can substitute any IDE to SCSI converter with any other one, regardless of manufacturer or model. And perhaps they'll still be around in five years time.

        Frankly though, I doubt that either statement is true. Devices like these are normally proprietary in some way or another and stop-gap technical fixes normally don't hang around forever - remember Stacker?

        The bottom line is this: the most valuable part of your system is your data. It's not something that you should risk losing so lightly.

  • 3ware has Serial ATA (and Parallel ATA) (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I posted a note on a different topic yesterday about RAID options.

    I highly recommend going to www.3ware.com or grab a used card on eBay. The cards use IDE drives but the volumes are perceived by the BIOS and operating system as SCSI devices.

    They have fantastic customer support, and write their own Linux drivers (which are constantly committed with stable kernel releases). BSD drivers are also available. I've never used them under Windows.

    The cards use a patented network-oriented algorithm for reading and writing to the IDE drives. Their benchmarks are impressive and well-publicized.

    Can't say enough nice things about them.
  • While not a solution today, the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) specification [t10.org] allows for adding Serial ATA devices to a SAS system. They both use the same physical layer, so support will only depend on whether companies support STP (Serial ATA Transport Protocol). Both the HBA and expander (a.k.a. switch) need to support STP for this to work.

    I expect we'll see many companies offering scary things like enterprise-class RAID boxes with your option of SAS or SATA drives. As other posters have already observed, ATA isn't reliable enough for this kind of thing and the added maintenance doesn't offset the cost difference for your average RAID installment.
  • I'm trying to see something new or special about that u160 pci card but I'm failing. There's nothing new about u160 or it being less than $200. See Tekram's line for examples of that. (Tekram's scsi adaptor offerings in general look very cool, as they typically have more features and cost less than the equivalent Adaptec offering. Plus, they supply via their ftp site drivers for all kinds of wacky OSen that other people don't (Solaris on x86, beos, etc).) Heck, the Tekram DC-390D3D card only costs about 30-50 dollars more and is a dual channel part... (Not that you'd need dual channel except for the most demanding workstation usage, or low/mid server construction.)
  • Now that you can get 512mb of ram for like 3 dollars I'd love to see a box that has a gig of front end cache with a ultrawide scsi connection out the front of one end and a whole bunch of ide connections out the back. So I could go out and buy a whole bunch of cheap IDE drives and have a superfast interface out the front. As for creating of the raid set, I'm not sure what would be a good solution.
  • The good: SCSI command set, ability to use more than 4 per controller per pci slot, can have drives externally using an old SCSI case and thus chain it outside of the main comp. case (finally, I can reuse my old NAS case)
    The bad : IDE drives are crappier than ever, so much so they most companies shortened the warranty periods to a year to save money, which in other words means, there were so many warranty returns that they were losing money.
    The ugliest: the Price, my budget, and lack of future funds, D'oh

    Well, there's also SerialATA which does incorporate some benefits of the SCSI command set (so you can burn, rip, play CS all on the same computer at the same time....awww...the benefits of a SCSI burner). The only downside other than the limitation on the number of drives per controller for SerialATA is that there's no external configuration.....yet. With SCSI, you can have a second case that has drives that would otherwise not fit in the main computer case (just look at the SCSI NAS stuff they sell...though they are hella expensive).

    damn....wish money grew on a tree in my backyard.

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