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Technology Stocks : Adaptec (ADPT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom M who wrote (1391)	3/26/1998 10:36:00 AM
From: RagTimeBand	Respond to of 5944

All: The following is from an article that's on page 562 of the March 1998, issue of Computer Shopper. New SCSI Standard Kicks Bus by Michael Zulich With processor clock speeds increasing by leaps and bounds, storage subsystems may be left grasping for breath. A new SCSI standard promises the kind of through-put necessary to keep up with the fastest new CPUs. As processor speeds increase, our disk drives may have a hard time keeping up. Current EIDE/ATAPI standards support UltraDMA, which is capable of transfer speeds of up to 33MB/sec, while Ultra SCSI tops out at 20MB/sec. But will these be fast enough? SCSI board and peripheral manufactures and members of the SCSI Trade Association (STA) believe that there is much to be gained from faster drive transfer speeds. They have proposed and are building a new flavor of SCSI, called Ultra2 or low-voltage-differential (LVD) SCSI that supports transfers at up to 80MB/sec. By the time you read this article, several vendors will have Ultra2 SCSI products on the shelves of CompUSA, Circuit City, and Fry's. The large mail-order drive resellers will follow suit. Upon close investigation, Ultra2 SCSI offers many advantages over its predecessor, Ultra SCSI, and many performance advantages over Ultra-DMA/33. Gone are many of the old SCSI restrictions, such as the short cable and bus length. And for high-speed network servers, there may be no faster method of data delivery. <snip> Both Adaptec and Diamond Multimedia Systems have introduced Ultra2 SCSI HBAs in the past several months, with many more vendors expected to jump on the bandwagon. Last October, Adaptec, released its 64-bit Ultra2 SCSI controller for motherboard implementations, the AIC-7891, and its multipurpose SE-to-LVD transducer chip, the AIC-3860. Around the beginning of the year, Diamond Multimedia released its FireBall 80 LVD PCI Ultra2 SCSI Host Adapter Kit. The Diamond design is based on Symbios Logic's SYM53C895 controller and SYM 53C141 SCSI Bus Expander, or transducer, chip. As with any other new technology, these products will be a little expensive, somewhere between $400 and $500, but we can expect these prices to drop as more vendors enter the fray and competition increases. <snip> The only real changes are the delivery means that now support transfer speeds of up to 80MB/sec. And with projections for transfer speeds up to 200MB/sec with Ultra3 SCSI, SCSI will be here for some time to come. SCSI is definitely not dying, as some may think, but bursting with a new energy and vigor that will likely put it at the top of the heap for high-speed systems.