SCSI Hard Drive Technology - Beam Me Up Scotty!

SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface and is a standard for connecting together computer storages devices and peripherals such as hard drives and image scanners although SCSI was best connection for providing lightning fast data transfer rates in hard drives and tape backup systems.

SCSI was the popular choice for many years in the Amiga, Apple and SUN computers. Commodore went out of business and the Amiga died a death. Apple swapped over to IDE in the late 1990s and SUN as now using SATA drives in their low end systems. The sad truth is that although SCSI offered far higher data transfer rates than its E-IDE/SATA rivals the drives were simply too expensive to ever become truly popular in the home computer market. The vast majority of RAID system on servers are SCSI based - they still hold their own here.

scsi cables

SCSI was (and still is to some extent) available in the following varients:

  • SCSI-1

  • Fast SCSI

  • Fast-Wide SCSI

  • SCSI-3 SPI

  • Ultra SCSI Fast-20

  • Ultra Wide SCSI

  • Ultra2 SCSI

  • Ultra2 Wide SCSI

  • Ultra3 SCSI

  • Ultra-320 SCSI

  • Ultra-640 SCSI