Monday, November 13, 2006

SCSI - A Dying Interface?

I have been working on some stuff that happen to require legacy SCSI connections. I have noticed through this experience that SCSI, at the level of consumer level PC, has already died and shortly there will be a time that all of our legacy SCSI devices won't have a way to be connected and retrieved. It will be just a matter of time.

Just take a notebook computer and try to find a way to connect it to a Ultra SCSI device you may have.

First you need to find a SCSI controller, presumably in PCMCIA or CardBUS format. Just about only people who still sell those are Adaptec, but if check the SCSI drivers, they basically stopped working on around 2000, and while their drivers would work on XP, there has not been any updates since.

Surely, there are USB and FireWire converters, but there always will be issues of driver compatibilities and your legacy app will also stop working.

And shortly you wont' be able to plug in a SCSI card to your notebooks because new notebooks will be equipped only with ExpressCARD architecture, which is based on PCI Express (not to be confused with PCI extended) architecture. At this time of writing there is no major manufacturer which makes ExpressCARD format SCSI adaptor.

Even in Enterprise class storage field, things are moving to iSCSI SANs for small SANs and the iSCSI RAID boxes themselves are based on SATA disks. I think SCSI will be around the paradigm shift has already occur ed in the industry at least in consumer and medium business market place, since I either cannot buy them or there are abundance of chaper alternatives already out.

No comments: