SCSI.

Just won a few SCSI cards - even found drivers for some of them.

Is SCSI still used?

Thanks.

Reply to
Benderthe.evilrobot
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Mostly just for older (legacy) equipment. I've still got one CD-R burner, an HP scanner, and some DAT drives which use SCSI. All of these are 5-10 years old.

Newer equipment has moved to other standards, almost all serial-bus of one sort or another (SCSI's parallel-bus architecture doesn't play well, or cheaply, at high speeds). SATA, SAS, Fiber Channel, USB, Ethernet etc. are much more common these days.

Reply to
Dave Platt

Thanks - I had a HP scanner that I expected to continue using indefinitely, the card that came with it was 8 bit ISA. When I upgraded out the ISA motherboards, I couldn't get the install disc to recognise a generic SCSI card.

Over a decade ago; there were loads of SH SCSI HDDs around - but nothing big enough to bother with now.

Reply to
Benderthe.evilrobot

Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of the DOS and Windows software for scanners and similar special-use peripherals was coded up to talk directly to a specific model of interface card, and would work with none other.

If you were exceptionally lucky, the vendor would have provided a higher-level API such as TWAIN, which could run on top of a more generic hardware-driver interface (e.g. on top of the generic ASPI interface to SCSI cards that provided such a driver).

If you're stuck... consider dual-booting a Linux distribution. Linux has support for all of the popular SCSI interface cards, and the Linux scanner interface software ("SANE") has back-end drivers for most popular scanners (SCSI and otherwise). I'm using an old HP legal-size flatbed scanner with an Adaptec PCI SCSI interface card... works fine.

Reply to
Dave Platt

I'm not stuck - I just won a bag of SCSI cards and wondered whether they're still any use for anything.

The HP scanner was replaced with a USB peripheral long ago.

Reply to
Benderthe.evilrobot

I've got a Mitutoyo CMM here that's interfaced with SCSI. I'd bet the newer ones are USB. The market for your cards is in keeping older equipment such as this working for another decade or so.

Reply to
Mark Storkamp

The same salvage source yielded a HP helical scan tape drive and a box of tape cartridges - its currently the only SCSI peripheral in my possession.

The cartridges are 12Gb - not even better than a cheap flash drive.

No sign of drivers on the HP support page, but they could be included in XP. Its the sort of thing I have to be pretty bored to bother finding out.

If I put critical data on those tapes and the drive went t*ts up - it could be a long wait to find a replacement.

Reply to
Benderthe.evilrobot

Ex-server used SCSI HDDs seem to go cheaply on Ebay because the usual used HDD customer base can't interface with them. Could be handy if you want to set up a networked storage box with RAID for redundancy, or something like that.

If you haven't delt with it before, make sure to read up on standards, rules for terminating, etc. Adapters are available cheaply from Chinese ebay sellers.

Beyond HDDs, I don't think much has used SCSI in (relatively) recent times.

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Reply to
Computer Nerd Kev

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