On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Jack Russell wrote: > 80 pin is found on the Ultra-SCSI wide systems and is capable of very fast > transfer rates. Drives for these systems are and expensive. When you see ads for > a Dual G4 quicksilver for commercial video use and the price is $6-7K. Read the > fine print and you'll find a whole batch of Ultra-SCSI wide drives installed.
Here's the deal on 80pin SCSI. Basically, it's 68pin wide scsi connector with power, LED, and address select lines passed through it. Normally they're used in an application with hot-swap SCSI bays, becuase the design of the 80pin connector allows for 'properly engineered' hot swapping (although I've done hot swapping with normal drives too. And no, 80pin (aka SCA) is NOT a PC thing. It's very much a high-end server thing (read: Sun Microsystems, SGI, some pc venders, IBM, probably Apple also). Older SCA drives can even be narror-scsi (8bit wide channel instead of the 16bit wide channel of wide-scsi) - for example, the drives in a Sun SparcStation 5 are this. Also, SCA 'works' for things faster or slower than Ultra SCSI - the SparcStation 5 drives are 'fast scsi' (10MHz), and should work all the way up to Ultra320 SCSI (insanely fast). Thanks to SCSI, you can use a wide-SCSI drive or an narror-SCSI drive on either narror or wide interface, the only limitation is the possible number of drives you can use (narrow supports 8 IDs, wide supports 16). So, there's the scoop on SCSI. Hope you all enjoyed. -- Pat -- Power Computing is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 123Inkjets.com <http://lowendmac.com/ad/123inkjets.html> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Power Computing list info: <http://lowendmac.com/power/list.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> List archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/powercomputing%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
