every thing you need to know about SCSI and SCSI drives.

I know a lot about computers, in fact I know more than some IT technicians, but due to me being pretty young compared to computers there is a lot of old hardware I don’t know about and one of them is SCSI.


After doing some research on the internet and the like I now know quite a lot! SCSI Stands for Small Computer System Interface.SCSI is mainly in servers because it can run lots of devices simultaneously. You connect SCSI hard drives, scanners, CD-ROM/RW drives, printers and tape drives to a SCSI host adapter.You don’t see SCSI in A lot of new computers because SCSI has mainly been taken over by SATA(serial-ATA) because newer SATA drives are faster and cheaper than SCSI drives.SCSI talks to your computer with a add-on card called a host adapter, some host adapters have both internal and external SCSI ports to fit a SCSI cable into.

SCSI is a very old technology (been around for 20 odd years)yet it is very fast,currently SCSI has speeds of up to 320 megabytes per second or MBps.

SCSI comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes but I will not go into all this in this article. If you would however like to see what they all look like and information on them go here: http://www.ramelectronics.net/scsi_connectors.ep

SCSI runs parallel which means all the information is sent at the same time and does not have to wait and send information one at a time.SCSI host adaptors have a built in BIOS just like your motherboard, this SCSI BIOS controls your SCSI drives. Every SCSI devises has a SCSI ID,this ID is important because without it the host adaptor won’t be able to speak to the other devises on the SCSI chain.

On the end of a SCSI daisy chain you have to put a terminator because then the SCSI drive does not know that there is no more devises connected, to do this you need to add a termination devise or set your devise to termination mode.

For more information on SCSI visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI