14 Aug
2008
14 Aug
'08
1:11 p.m.
On 14 Aug 2008 at 20:42, Antonio Carlini wrote:
I got the impression that SCSI was used (in those
days) in higher
end systems. If you stuck with one vendor, you probably only played
with well tested configs but if you tried to save money because "it's
all SCSI, it must all play together" then you could run into issues.
I know one of the reasons that DEC was late to the SCSI game was that
they felt it didn't meet their reliablity requirements.
Early SCSI was pretty awful, largely the province of users with Macs,
but by the time that the Adaptec 1540 series hit the market, things
had gotten a lot better. Drivers were always an issue (e.g., does
anyone have a NetBSD driver for an Ultrastor 14N?).
If you wanted a bunch of storage on a PC-type machine, SCSI was
pretty much the only way to get it. 7 devices (or 56 if you could
unit-address them) on a SCSI bus was pretty cool--particularly if you
had an interest in RAID. I have a couple of Adaptec 3985 PCI cards
that appear to the system as 3 2940 controllers. Intended for
Netware RAID setups.
I believe that SCSI was used extensively for external devices, where
that was rare for IDE. External means confusion with cabling,
termination, etc. The multiple SCSI electrical varieties (8-bit,
wide, ultra-wide, ultra2-wide, differential, etc.) didn't help un-
muddy the waters either.
Cheers,
Chuck