27 Nov
2007
27 Nov
'07
9:52 a.m.
Al Kossow wrote:
I left a sentence out of that..
If you write your own software for the 5380, you can control SASI
devices. You just don't use the features (like disconnect/reconnect)
that SCSI implemented. The 5380 is a very dumb device, and doesn't
do any of the bus protocol in hardware.
How much of a
difference is there between the two, really?
The big difference is the addition of bus disconnect/reconnect in SCSI.
SASI devices hogged the bus until a transaction completed, which didn't
work well for high latency operations like tape seeks/rewinds.
An NCR 5380 SCSI controller will work fine with SASI devices. At one
point it was easy to find them on ISA cards, haven't looked lately.
Mixing SASI/SCSI on the same bus is problematic if the SCSI devices try to
disconnect.