Quick SCSI question I hope

**pbharris** · December 11th, 2001, 12:34 PM

Hi All,
Can you put an U160 HD onto an UltraWide or Fast SCSI card, and just have the card as the bottleneck?
Thanks

**Tom Jones** · December 11th, 2001, 01:13 PM

Yes, but its a bummer.... You will need a pin out converter.. Get a cheap SCSI card... I had to do that on my wife's Mac....no PCI slots to use and I just needed one.....

**pbharris** · December 11th, 2001, 02:24 PM

Thanks Tom!!

**Tom Jones** · December 11th, 2001, 03:51 PM

Was not sure what your pin out was. I had a 80 pin hot swap SCSI and they make a converter with a plug for power and then it steps down to 50 pins that I connected to internal SCSI flat cable. Sorry, but I don't remember where I ordered it from.

**Tom Jones** · December 11th, 2001, 03:57 PM

Was not sure what your pin out was. I had a 80 pin hot swap SCSI and they make a converter with a plug for power and then it steps down to 50 pins that I connected to internal SCSI flat cable. Sorry, but I don't remember where I ordered it from.

**Peter M** · December 11th, 2001, 07:22 PM

LVD (U2W, U160) drives run on SE (UW, U, Fast or even standard SCSI) controllers. They auto-detect the electrically different bus, and an appropriate transfer speed and cable width will also be negotiated correctly.

The only caveat is that LVD drives never come with embedded terminators, so you'll have to see how you get your SCSI chain terminated. And LVD drives always are Wide-SCSI as well, so you'd need a special adapter (which terminates the unused upper half of the Wide bus on the drive side) to attach it to a Narrow 50-pin cable

Speedwise, many midrange to high end SCSI HDDs are way faster than 40 MB/s, so you better put them on an LVD channel.

There are low cost single channel adapters around, like LSI's 20160, best are those dual channel things that have one fast and one slow channel. Tekram 390U3W offers the best performance in a really complete retail pack.

regards, Peter