Will an external drive work with SCSI?

Trenix25

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I have a laptop PC with a SCSI drive controller. I need to buy and use an external SSD connected with USB. I cannot find any external SSDs that say they are SCSI devices. Since the external drive will be connected with USB will this matter? I am currently fighting with a Western Digital hard drive that is registering as /dev/sdb. The hard drive appears to have more bad sectors than good ones. The drive platters must look like someone took a sand blaster to them. e2fsck has been looking for bad blocks on /dev/sdb2 for nearly nineteen and a half hours and it's 5.01% done checking a 250 GB hard drive. I called it as fsck.ext4 to check a new ext4 file system which ran e2fsck.

Signed,

Matthew
 


Actual SCSI is a truly strange beast. The last time I had any experience with it was with an old Mac SE from the early 80's, and it busted my chops then. You probably can still find SCI drives, but then you have to be concerned with termination resistors and other esoteric s**t.

I would donate the SCSI controller to a computing museum and just go with straight up USB or SATA.

As for the WD drive, what options did you use when you started fsck? Normally you would just start sudo fsck /dev/sd<whatever> against an unmounted drive and within a matter of seconds it's either done, needs some user replies, or errors out. The fsck will detect what filesystem is on the drive and call the correct extension. You don't need to specify the extension, unless you really want to :confused:
 
I have since repartitioned to exclude the damaged areas. The SCSI controller is buried inside the computer. I plan to use an external SSD connected with USB. Will that still work in spite of having a SCSI controller even if the external SSD is not a SCSI device?
 

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I'm pretty sure that SCSI signals and USB signals are very different.

And what I mean by that is the drive's on-board controller for a SCSI disk is programmed to see certain commands in a specific way from the in-computer SCSI controller. And those are not the same as what an ATA or SATA drive will expect. i wouldn't waste my time with trying to make a SCSI board work with non-SCSI drives.
 
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Go with straight up USB? The new SSD would have a USB connection, not a ribbon connection. Are you suggesting that I use a USB stick? That would really slow things down.
 
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I'm saying that SCSI with its 68(?) pin connector is completely incompatible with any drive that is not SCSI. If you are connecting some SATA or PATA drive via a USB connector and an appropriate adapter, that will work well. As long as you are not connecting directly to the SCSI controller, it's all good.
 
I'm using a Western Digital (model 2500BMV External) hard drive connected to a laptop with USB. I couldn't find the specs on it anywhere. I thought it was 2500BVM, hmmm. It's a 250 GB external USB hard drive. The laptop has a SCSI drive controller and Linux is identifying it as /dev/sdb. It's a black rectangle with a white LED light on it that blinks when drive activity occurs, or stays on otherwise.
 
What constitutes an "appropriate adapter?" The drive connects to the computer with a standard USB cable.
 
Go with straight up USB? The new SSD would have a USB connection, not a ribbon connection. Are you suggesting that I use a USB stick? That would really slow things down.

Actually USB 3.x especially 3.2 and newer would be faster than SCSI.
There are external SATA and USB drives. The other thing about external SCSI is you would need
an external power connector.

According to this article that drive is a SATA/USB drives. Not SCSI

 
It looks like that new external SSD is going to work then. Hopefully it will work much better than this Western Digital hard drive. The laptop also appears to have an IDE system in it as well. I recently found that. It seems the DVD writer may be an IDE drive. Strange that it uses both types.
 
Strange that it uses both types.

I have some systems that have SCSI, SATA, AHCI, iSCSI, FiberChannel, SSD, IDE, and USB all on the same computer. (Only 1 SCSI box left). USB, SATA, and AHCI all together is pretty common on the current generation.
 

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