Advantages: A bargain. Easy to install and used. Good entry level SCSI controller.
Disadvantages: No support for higher data rates.

...If you plug an SCSI card into your pc, don’t hold your breath because nothing exciting is going to happen. (Unless of course you have made a very bad job of installing the card. Then you might see smoke and flames coming from your cherished/reviled PC or even, in extreme cases, find yourself moving down a tunnel towards a bright light.) However, once you have installed you SCSI card you will be able to attach any number of exciting devices to your pc. Although this is an opinion of Adaptecs AVA-2900 series of SCSI card, it is also a general review of SCSI. I have done this because as far as I can tell this is the first review at Ciao of a SCSI controller card. This seems to be a bit of an over sight to me as any number of SCSI devices have been reviewed, (such as the excellent Plextor external SCSI cd writer which was the subject... Read review

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Advantages: Super fast, Burn proof, attractive design.
Disadvantages: Requires Scsi card.

...also needed to buy a special and expensive SCSI controller card. The price and performance difference gap between SCSI has now fallen significantly (IDE is better SCSI is cheaper). You can now pick up a brand new SCSI card for £30 to £40, in particular adaptecs budget series, which I have also reviewed. You will need such a card if you buy this cdwriter! Installation was easy. The plextor 12/10/32S I have is an external SCSI drives so it plugs into the external port on the SCSI card, which was already installed. Start the pc, and it magically appears in windows. Dead easy. It was also necessary to install some cd writing software. In this case, the cd writer came bundled with the usual offerings, which installed and ran perfectly. One minor problem encountered was the SCSI cable that ran between the writer and PC. SCSI has been around... Read review

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Advantages: Plug n play, reliable, efficient
Disadvantages: A bit pricy

...Finally, just when I was begining to give up on ever attaching my SCSI drive to my system, along came the answer to my prayers. A neat fitted in seconds, no need to open the case solution; the Adaptec USB to SCSI connector. This piece of electronic genius allows you to connect virtually any SCSI device directly to your PC through its USB port. It works and is brilliant. It just plugs in and away it goes. Everything is supplied and with easy to follow directions. It is not cheap though, expect to pay about $50 ($90) for it but compared with a SCSI card & cables it probably works out the same and is definately 100% less hastle than trying to configure an already stuffed full to the brim machine. It's got my vote.... Read review

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Advantages: Now cheap, reasonable data volumes, easy to use
Disadvantages: new media hard to obtain, old technology

...the functionality described in the opening paragraph. The full kit comprises of a SCSI external disk drive, in a plastic enclosure which can stand vertically or horizontally on your desktop, a 'power brick' and a parallel to SCSI interface cable, and driver software. The removable disks consist of two circular platters mounted in a rigid plastic casing, around 1cm thick and just about the same size as a 3.5" floppy disk. The nominal capacity of this media is stated as 1.5Gb, which by my reckoning is around a thousand floppy disks, or putting it another way enough for (according to the media box); 1500 pictures at 450x750 pixels 2 hours of CD quality stereo audio 50 minutes of MPEG video The capacity of 2xCD-ROMs And claims a cost of 8 cents a megabyte. I've no idea how many MP3 tracks can be put on 1.5Gb, but the playing time is probably... Read review

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Advantages: Very portable, Easy to Use
Disadvantages: Extra plug socket needed

...Having two seperate office locations, my company got fed up of having to burn CD's to transfer large amounts of data from one place to another. This worked out OK for a while, but with a CD only being able to store up to 700MB, we were spending quite a lot of time burning the disks, so an external HDD was in order. We had used external SCSI disks in the past, but there were a few disadvantages involved, namely having to physically shut the computer down to remove the device and then having to shut down the second machine to attach the disk at the second place. The price for SCSI disks are still a bit expensive as well. We got hold of this external drive, and our work methods were transformed overnight. No more restarting machines or burning cd's, just plug it in and copy as if it was an internal disk. Installation was very straight... Read review

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Advantages: online capacity expansion, deals with hard disc problems better
Disadvantages: slow compared to software RAID

...Dead cheap raid 5 card compared to similar others (£50 cheaper). It also allows online capacity upgrades, which basically means you can expand the size of the RAID without destroying the data on the RAID. handy! The main reason for me getting a RAID 5 hardware solution rather than a software solution again, is the fact that even if one of the hard discs on a software RAID5 becomes slightly iffy, it drops it, and you have to rebuild!!! With hardware RAID5, it'll automatically recover, and will rebuild in the background. This fits into my PCI-33 slot, but can alos connect to a PCI64. mmmm tasty... It has LEDs on the card for RAID access, CRC, and Drive access (4 LEDS) and it has all the necessary connectors for external LEDS too! I nearly creamed myself with the thought of 6 blue LEDS connected externally to the RAID card. I would... Read review

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Advantages: Good deal
Disadvantages: ports

...are 25pin Ds, which are not the most common these days, and there is no terminator supplied. These are only a problem if you already have a SCSI setup, and mean that you need to spend a few extra pounds on cables or a terminator. If this is your first SCSI device then you have all you need to get going in the box. [Although recommended a terminator on a single SCSI device is not required]. Also the card driver is not fully featured, it does enough to allow you to use the scanner - so don't expect to be able to add a CD-RW or tape drive to the SCSI chain without first buying another SCSI card. Having said that I'm more than happy with it, and with so many other USB devices available I'm glad this hasn't used one of the available connections.... Read review

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Advantages: nothing comes to mind
Disadvantages: no raw writing, questionable reliability record

...I had this as a replacment to a faulty 4260 model. It looks much the same and feels the same but reading is 16x instead of 6x and writing is twice as fast for CDRW CDs at 4x. Normal CDRs remain at 4x writing. The drive does everything it claims to do and seems less fussy over CDRs than the 4260. It doesn't do raw writing but does happily work with 80min cdrs and overburning. It has a built in fan which I'm sure is beneficial compared to the 4260 which didn't. I had some problems configuring it but this is probably more to do with scsi than anything else. I personally would have prefered the old style scsi large connectors on the external case, they seem to make better contact and are more robust but this case has the more flimsy 50pin high denisty scsi 2 type connectors. I've yet to see it do CDRW CDs at 4x as I think most of the ones I... Read review

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Advantages: cheap, reliable, quick [scsi], incs transparency adaptor
Disadvantages: no scsi support [afaik] under win2k

...Looking for a cheap scanner, I happened upon this beauty in jungle? why beauty? well it only cost me £60 INCLUDING the transparency adaptor. and it includes a scsi port [a DB25 type, ie looks like parallel] as well as the more conventional USB type. This is a brilliant idea, although they only provide the cheaper USB cable [and it's quite short at that] It is reasonably quick through USB, not stunning but then I wouldn't expect so for this price. Through scsi however, it was about DOUBLE the speed. I was mightily impressed. It has the usualscsi pass through, scsi id etc. The buttons [to-program, copy, user-defined] on the scanner are useful, and it isn't *too* tricky to change what program it uses in the TWAIN drivers - it defaults to the included page something or other - not the adobe one oc! - which is fine for beginners, a pain... Read review

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Advantages: Quiet, Compact and Reliable
Disadvantages: Occasional difficulty initialising tapes

...which will extend the tape capacity to 24GB. Installation was simple requiring no software install. It is an external SCSI device, so a simple cable connection completes the physical install and Windows XP/2000 Backup is all that is needed to start creating backups.... Read review

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