80 pin SCSI hard drives.

[Mark Ovens]

Alfredo Finelli wrote:
> I have 80 pin SCSI discs mounted in hot-swappable trays on a SCSI 
> backplane which takes care also of powering them up and of SCSI 
> termination.  This is one way of using them.
> 
> I also have the same drives in a different system connected to normal SCSI 
> LVD cable using small adaptors which have an 80 pin receptacle on one 
> side and a 68 pin SCSI connector plus 4 pin molex power connector on the 
> other, as well as jumpers to define SCSI id.  In this second case you 
> have to provide the required termination of the SCSI bus (e.g. using the 
> right terminated SCSI cable).
> 

So you can confirm that using these adaptors works OK? When I bought my 
SCSI drive (off eBay) there were more SCA drives for sale than 68-pin 
but doing some research about 80->68 pin adaptors I found a lot of 
people saying not to use them, including Adaptec:

This from Adaptec's ASK knowledgebase http://tinyurl.com/b3ofa

"Although there are adapters on the market converting 80 pin to 68 pin 
they are not supported by Adaptec or the hard drive manufacturers. These 
convertors can cause loss of signal integrity that may result in 
connectivity issues and data loss."

This put me off getting a SCA drive. Now I'm looking for a another drive 
and SCA ones seem to be cheaper on eBay.

Regards,

Mark