The Return Of SCSI

There was a time when high-performance disk drives used SCSI — the Small Computer System Interface — and everything else was kid stuff. Now, advanced forms of SCSI are still around but there are other high-performing disk interfaces, too. But some old gear really loves their classic SCSI ports, and [Adrian] decided to try hooking some of them up to some modern computers. You can see how he did in the video below.

The key to the attempt is a USB to SCSI adapter which was unusual but not unheard of, and [Adrian] came across one from 1999. Of course, you have to wonder if a modern computer will support the device or will be able to load the drivers from the old CD.

One of the problems with these adapters is that SCSI was a high-performance bus for its day, and the corresponding USB speed was not so much. Parallel SCSI used differential signaling and could reach up to 320 MB/s. Ordinary USB weighs in at 1.5 MB/s. USB 2 did a little better, but it would take USB 3 to eclipse the old SCSI data rate. Of course, SCSI went serial like USB and modern serial-attached SCSI can blow the doors off even the fastest USB devices.

We doubt you really need to use a SCSI device as an everyday thing, but you might want to or need to read one that shows up. Plus it is just a really interesting look into the way things were. Finding the drivers were, as you’d expect, a real pain. Turns out, he probably didn’t need to bother as Windows knows how to treat it as a storage device but he didn’t figure that out right away.

Android didn’t seem to work as well, although that may have been because the phone didn’t recognize the disk format.