SCSI hardrive install

[WOWZY]

A friend of mine's company just upgraded all their SCSI hardrives to much larger SCSI's. He gave me a brand new 18. 2G SCSI hardrive and also a SCSI to IDE adapter.



I have a 9Gig IDE and a 40Gig IDE(40G running as slave) and am wanting to replace the 9G with the 18. 2G SCSI as my primary HD.



Since WindowsMe is on my 9G, how do I install this one and make it take the place of my 9G? Do I just transfer all the data to the 40 and then back to the SCSI??



One other thing, this SCSI HD didn't come with a disc. If I need one how and where do I get one?

 

[dan_gilson]

When you change from an IDE to a SCSI drive you normally have to purchase a SCSI adapter (HBA - hardware bus adapter). Typically Adaptec or other brands. You need to determine what type of SCSI drive you have which will determine what type of HBA you will need. Unless of course that your motherboard has a SCSI adapter built into it. Not many do except for the very ih end motherboards.



Get the model# from the drive and go to google.com and see if it will point you to the vendors site. What you want to find out is whether the drive is SCSI narrow, wide, single ended, differential, LVD (low voltage differential), fast, SCSI II, SCSI III, SCSI-160 or SCSI-320.



Don't be scared. If you get an HBA that is SCSI-III, SCSI-160, SCSI-320 it should work with all drives EXCEPT differential. DO NOT connect a differential drive to anything BUT a differential adapter. If you do you will probably blow both the drive and the adapter. Also LVD and differential are not the same thing.



Another reason why I like pointing people to Adaptec HBA's is that they tend to come with a wide varity of cables. You should be able to match one of the cables to the drive that you have. If not plan on spending up to $80 to get the correct cable.

 

[dmurdock]

Are you sure it's a scsi to ide adapter? I've never heard of such a thing. Is it a little board the plugs into the back of the drive and has a cable connector and a power connector?? This is a scsi3 to scsi2 adapter (hehehe, they make those just for people who find hard drives which happen to "fall" out of servers... )

 

[WOWZY]

Ok this SCSI HD is not an external HD. It is an internal and It looks just like the IDE HD's.



It's an IBM Ultrastar 68 pin 18. 2G 10,000rpm HD



dmurdock,



Yes, it's a little adapter that has little circuit board attached to it. On the circuit board is a SCSI 68 pin plug and an IDE plug for a regular IDE cable. This adapter has 2 sided tape to hold it to the HD.



Although I didn't get to see an actual install in the PC's I have seen the guy replace a few 2gig IDE's directly with this same 18. 2G SCSI and adapter in a few machines that run them. All he did was take the old IDE drive out, mount the SCSI in it's place, plug the IDE cable into the adapter on the back of the SCSI, shove in a 3. 5" floppy and leave.



May have to get him to get me a copy of that floppy.

 

[cdpsrjc]

Wowzy,



Please count the pins on the 'IDE' connection and tell us how many there are. I know they're small, but I'm betting there are 50 and that makes your IDE connection actually a SCSI2 connection(50 pin ribbon cable).

The drive you mention is a great drive (I have two of them) connected to a Tekram DC390U2W SCSI card. In my experience, if you want to boot from this drive, your PC BIOS will need to support SCSI boot devices. If you do not already have a SCSI host card, it would be cheaper and easier to buy a new IDE drive and replace the 9GB with a larger IDE.



As for transferring all your data from the old drive to the new drive... Norton Ghost or another drive cloning program is exactly the tool for the job.



Richard

 

[fest3er]

I do not know for sure, but I *think* it might be possible for this SCSI-IDE adapter to work. It is becoming more common to run SCSI over IDE for at least certain things (like ATAPI CD drives). Linux does this, and I think Win2K may as well.

It would be interesting to see if this is what is really being done. I've got a SCSI disk I'd like to use, and am too cheap to buy a SCSI adapter!

Fest3er

 

[PRout]

Forget the SCSI. Its more problems than its worth.



Stick w/ IDE. With the price, size, availability, ease of use, & speed of the newer IDE's theres almost no reason to go w/ scsi, unless youre doing RAID arrays, or some app that requires it. .

 

[WOWZY]

The other connector on the adapter is a 50 pin and not a IDE connector.



My friend tells me that the same company that made this adapter also makes one that is a true IDE adapter and he's gonna call me when he finds out more.



The main reason that I want to use this drive is because it was free, but I haven't heard of many problems out of the 18G or 36G SCSI's. I have heard bad things about the older 9. 1's though.

 

[dan_gilson]

If it looks like a wider (more pins) version of IDE it is SCSI narrow. There is not cable changer to convert IDE signals to SCSI. The protocol is different. If you want to use this drive you will have to get a HBA. The good thing is that you can then run BOTH SCSI and IDE drives in your system and because they are on different busses the is a slight performance gain when getting data from both buses at the same time.



I agree SCSI is a hassle if you are not used to it. Like anything you must follow the rules that it comes with. Keeping that in mind SCSI is more reliable and performs better than IDE when comparing apples to apples. In high proformance systems you can overlap multiple IO's with SCSI where IDE is a single request at a time.