9 ms·

Years ago, I think when I was still using a Commodore Amiga system, I went into a computer shop in St. Louis to see if they had any SCSI drives. The clerk at t

by tjr 6y ago

Years ago, I think when I was still using a Commodore Amiga system, I went into a computer shop in St. Louis to see if they had any SCSI drives. The clerk at the store went off on this surprisingly lengthy and heated diatribe about how SCSI was mediocre technology, and how nobody in their right mind should ever want anything SCSI ever again. I kind of miss that sort of passion in computer store clerks.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Looks down at Ryzen PC with three SCSI CD-ROMs: "Hear that fellas? You're just mediocre."
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Sounds like a hassle. Didn't you need to buy a PCIe-SCSI HBA somewhere along the line, along with some kind of terminator for the upper half of a modern SCSI bus? Aren't very good SATA optical drives $20?
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Some B350 boards still had legacy PCI slots. I have another PCI card I need to use so there was a spare slot left over. My use case was ripping CDs and for that you are better off using a longer wavelength CD-ROM laser and Plextor drives in particular for their better firmware capabilities.
  - jmalicki 6y ago
    ATAPI and SATA are also SCSI at their core. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface
    - hlandau 6y ago
      You can tunnel SCSI over PATA/SATA using ATAPI, used for optical drives. That's a bit different from SATA being "SCSI at their core"; the entire point of ATAPI is that ATA isn't SCSI.
  - phjesusthatguy3 6y ago
    My first CD burner came with a PCMCIA ("People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms") SCSI card. That only had Windows drivers. It might be supported by the Linux kernel by now, but it's long gone. And I don't have a computer with PCMCIA slots anymore.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > Ryzen PC with three SCSI CD-ROMs Out of curiosity, what's that for? I'm struggling to think of a case where reading that many optical discs is actually useful
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    Can't speak for the OP, but I used a rig with three CDROMS on it to rip my wife's CD collection to the first iPod. It took months, but would have taken months longer if I only had one drive.
  - xxpor 6y ago
    My first ever CD burner was a external SCSI drive. So that computer ended up having 3 drives, but realistically we only ever used 2: one for music, one for a program usually. We didn't rip the music because a) it took forever back then to encode to mp3, and b) we didn't have enough HDD space! I remember when we were trying to burn CDs, about 1/4 of the time it failed. I pointed out that we didn't have a SCSI terminator on the other slot, but my dad insisted what difference could that possibly make? And to be honest, at the time (I must have been between 8-10 at this point), I couldn't really disagree with him. It was just this chunk of plastic that plugged into the port, it looked more like a protector than anything actually useful. Anyway, we tried it out and it did resolve our issues, but I still had no idea why until I got to college and learned about different buses in some computer engineering class.
hammock 6y ago
"Years ago" I was always told by my computer geekier friends that SCSI was better than IDE. And that you could put it in RAID arrays etc..
UI_at_80x24 6y ago
Passion related to computers as a hobby is the thing I miss. Once upon a time if your were "into computers" that meant something, now everybody thinks that they are into computers. "Like facebook right?" <eye-twitch> My first x86 PC had a 425MB SCSI-II hard-drive and a "triple Speed" (3x) CD-ROM. Having a SCSI drive with a seek time of UNDER 11ms was enough to blow the doors off of every other computer I came across (IIRC 4ms was the actual time vs 11ms for most other 120MB HD's at the time.) Everything about SCSI was cool. Over powered, over engineered, and willing to take abuse better then anything else. It was an AMD 386DX-40, 8MB of RAM, a VGA-Wonder XL video card, a Logitech bus mouse, soundblaster, and 2 modems; 14.4 & a 56k USR. AND I ran linux on it. Well I could install linux, and couldn't really figure out what to do with it after that. But Even back then Linux detected EVERYTHING, and it was FAST.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  The main thing I remember (I didn't worry as much about performance back then) was when I was grabbing a replacement from a pile of ribbon cables we had in a box, the wider ones were for SCSI, the narrower ones for IDE. Then SCSI-II and SCSI-III and ATAPI/UATA/PATA cables came along and started making the ease-of-identification based on just visual traits a lot more difficult.
- rootsudo 6y ago
  Now ask people if they have Internet. "What, no, I have Facebook."
bsder 6y ago
> The clerk at the store went off on this surprisingly lengthy and heated diatribe about how SCSI was mediocre technology, and how nobody in their right mind should ever want anything SCSI ever again. vs What in 1990? Pray tell. Parallel IDE? I'd have laughed in his face if he said that. The biggest problem with SCSI was always the fact that you had to understand termination or the bus you built wasn't going to work. The second biggest problem with SCSI was always the fact that it was more expensive. Cables were especially expensive, but controllers weren't cheap either.
- toast0 6y ago
  > vs What in 1990? Pray tell. Parallel IDE? I'd have laughed in his face if he said that. Yeah, back then Macs were bad, but at least they had SCSI, so they had something going for them. Of course, then they went to IDE, and had nothing going for them anymore.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  > The biggest problem with SCSI was always the fact that you had to understand termination or the bus you built wasn't going to work. This is just a fundamental limitation of a high-speed parallel shared bus for 1990s' technology, not really specific to SCSI. Termination is needed because of physics, there was no way to workaround it. Moving termination to the drives and backplane is a solution (e.g. PCI uses it), but I guess it was too inflexible for SCSI when cables were often chained together. Ultimately the problem has been solved by Moore's Law - when chips are powerful enough, it makes sense to just stop using parallel buses entirely, and move to point-to-point serial lines. Termination is implemented at end-points, and the bus is never shared, eliminating this problem. Just like how Ethernet began as a low-cost bus network (and yes, you need to add terminations on 10BASE-2) and ultimately evolved to point-to-point serial lines.
  - pdkl95 6y ago
    > Moving termination to the ... backplane is a solution (e.g. PCI uses it) While PCI does solve the reflection problem in the backplane, the PCI bus is not terminated. When a signal first passes by the receiving device it only sees a weak signal that is only a fraction of the expected amplitude. When the signal reflects off the end of the bus, it passes by the receiving device again. The receiving device sees the initial signal's amplitude added to the reflecting wave's amplitude as the expected full strength signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflected-wave_switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflected-wave_switching

by tjr 6y ago

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago

Looks down at Ryzen PC with three SCSI CD-ROMs: "Hear that fellas? You're just mediocre."

jeffbee 6y ago
Sounds like a hassle. Didn't you need to buy a PCIe-SCSI HBA somewhere along the line, along with some kind of terminator for the upper half of a modern SCSI bus? Aren't very good SATA optical drives $20?
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Some B350 boards still had legacy PCI slots. I have another PCI card I need to use so there was a spare slot left over. My use case was ripping CDs and for that you are better off using a longer wavelength CD-ROM laser and Plextor drives in particular for their better firmware capabilities.
- jmalicki 6y ago
  ATAPI and SATA are also SCSI at their core. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATA_Packet_Interface
  - hlandau 6y ago
    You can tunnel SCSI over PATA/SATA using ATAPI, used for optical drives. That's a bit different from SATA being "SCSI at their core"; the entire point of ATAPI is that ATA isn't SCSI.
- phjesusthatguy3 6y ago
  My first CD burner came with a PCMCIA ("People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms") SCSI card. That only had Windows drivers. It might be supported by the Linux kernel by now, but it's long gone. And I don't have a computer with PCMCIA slots anymore.
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> Ryzen PC with three SCSI CD-ROMs Out of curiosity, what's that for? I'm struggling to think of a case where reading that many optical discs is actually useful
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Can't speak for the OP, but I used a rig with three CDROMS on it to rip my wife's CD collection to the first iPod. It took months, but would have taken months longer if I only had one drive.
- xxpor 6y ago
  My first ever CD burner was a external SCSI drive. So that computer ended up having 3 drives, but realistically we only ever used 2: one for music, one for a program usually. We didn't rip the music because a) it took forever back then to encode to mp3, and b) we didn't have enough HDD space! I remember when we were trying to burn CDs, about 1/4 of the time it failed. I pointed out that we didn't have a SCSI terminator on the other slot, but my dad insisted what difference could that possibly make? And to be honest, at the time (I must have been between 8-10 at this point), I couldn't really disagree with him. It was just this chunk of plastic that plugged into the port, it looked more like a protector than anything actually useful. Anyway, we tried it out and it did resolve our issues, but I still had no idea why until I got to college and learned about different buses in some computer engineering class.

hammock 6y ago

"Years ago" I was always told by my computer geekier friends that SCSI was better than IDE. And that you could put it in RAID arrays etc..

UI_at_80x24 6y ago

Passion related to computers as a hobby is the thing I miss. Once upon a time if your were "into computers" that meant something, now everybody thinks that they are into computers. "Like facebook right?" <eye-twitch> My first x86 PC had a 425MB SCSI-II hard-drive and a "triple Speed" (3x) CD-ROM. Having a SCSI drive with a seek time of UNDER 11ms was enough to blow the doors off of every other computer I came across (IIRC 4ms was the actual time vs 11ms for most other 120MB HD's at the time.) Everything about SCSI was cool. Over powered, over engineered, and willing to take abuse better then anything else. It was an AMD 386DX-40, 8MB of RAM, a VGA-Wonder XL video card, a Logitech bus mouse, soundblaster, and 2 modems; 14.4 & a 56k USR. AND I ran linux on it. Well I could install linux, and couldn't really figure out what to do with it after that. But Even back then Linux detected EVERYTHING, and it was FAST.

geerlingguy 6y ago
The main thing I remember (I didn't worry as much about performance back then) was when I was grabbing a replacement from a pile of ribbon cables we had in a box, the wider ones were for SCSI, the narrower ones for IDE. Then SCSI-II and SCSI-III and ATAPI/UATA/PATA cables came along and started making the ease-of-identification based on just visual traits a lot more difficult.
rootsudo 6y ago
Now ask people if they have Internet. "What, no, I have Facebook."

bsder 6y ago

> The clerk at the store went off on this surprisingly lengthy and heated diatribe about how SCSI was mediocre technology, and how nobody in their right mind should ever want anything SCSI ever again. vs What in 1990? Pray tell. Parallel IDE? I'd have laughed in his face if he said that. The biggest problem with SCSI was always the fact that you had to understand termination or the bus you built wasn't going to work. The second biggest problem with SCSI was always the fact that it was more expensive. Cables were especially expensive, but controllers weren't cheap either.

toast0 6y ago
> vs What in 1990? Pray tell. Parallel IDE? I'd have laughed in his face if he said that. Yeah, back then Macs were bad, but at least they had SCSI, so they had something going for them. Of course, then they went to IDE, and had nothing going for them anymore.
segfaultbuserr 6y ago
> The biggest problem with SCSI was always the fact that you had to understand termination or the bus you built wasn't going to work. This is just a fundamental limitation of a high-speed parallel shared bus for 1990s' technology, not really specific to SCSI. Termination is needed because of physics, there was no way to workaround it. Moving termination to the drives and backplane is a solution (e.g. PCI uses it), but I guess it was too inflexible for SCSI when cables were often chained together. Ultimately the problem has been solved by Moore's Law - when chips are powerful enough, it makes sense to just stop using parallel buses entirely, and move to point-to-point serial lines. Termination is implemented at end-points, and the bus is never shared, eliminating this problem. Just like how Ethernet began as a low-cost bus network (and yes, you need to add terminations on 10BASE-2) and ultimately evolved to point-to-point serial lines.
- pdkl95 6y ago
  > Moving termination to the ... backplane is a solution (e.g. PCI uses it) While PCI does solve the reflection problem in the backplane, the PCI bus is not terminated. When a signal first passes by the receiving device it only sees a weak signal that is only a fraction of the expected amplitude. When the signal reflects off the end of the bus, it passes by the receiving device again. The receiving device sees the initial signal's amplitude added to the reflecting wave's amplitude as the expected full strength signal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflected-wave_switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflected-wave_switching