USB SCSI enclosures

[Mark R]

I have a moderate need for a USB 5.25 optical drive to retrieve data from some 2.3 GB optical discs at work.

Unfortunately, the price of new drive is prohibitive (> $1k), however, used drives can be found on ebay for <$100. The only catch is that they're SCSI, which isn't ideal when I need a portable drive.

I've only ever seen IDE-USB enclosures, but was wondering if anyone had ever heard of a USB-SCSI one.

 

[Peter]

There are USB-SCSI interface "cables", mostly being used on Macintoshes. The more popular - and faster - solution on Windows portables is PCMCIA (Cardbus) SCSI controllers.

E.g. Adaptec's SlimSCSI 1480 for Ultra (Narrow) SCSI, or

http://www.delock.de/produkte/...10.html?setLanguage=EN

for a Wide-Ultra2 adapter.

 

[corkyg]

The closest thing to SCSI in that arena is Firewire. It is in fact, derived from SCSI.

But, as Peter suggests, I would consider a PCMCIA SCSI adapter. I used them for a few years - Adaptec had a good one. Sample:

1460

 

[Peter]

The 1460 is 16-bit PCMCIA, abysmally slow by today's standards - and because DMA capability for 16-bit cards has long been dropped from the Cardbus standard, it will do its 2 MB/s at 100% CPU load. (I still have one of those, only used for data retrieval emergencies.)

The 1480 is much better, being 32-bit cardbus with a proper PCI SCSI controller in it. It does Ultra-SCSI with actual transfer rates around 17 MB/s max. The other card I linked to (also available from various other OEMs) is what we use at work. It has a U2W controller chip in it, and reaches up to 66 MB/s actual throughput.

 

[corkyg]

Good call - now you know why I left laptop SCSI at 16-bit. 🙂

But this case involves data salvage on a one time basis at the lowest cost. All options are on the table.

 

[Peter]

... and the fastest is actually the cheapest (at 50 euros) because you don't have to pay the Adaptec name and still get a quality SCSI controller (an LSI) 🙂