HISTORY:
You might think, hell! that's an old card, who uses SCSI these days? It's true that it is old, in fact this card last saw serious "work" 15 years ago and has been "taking a rest" ever since ... SCSI might be forgotten however if you dabble with or restore old consumer and industrial equipment, the chances are that you will come across SCSI at some stage.
Sit back and let me tell you all about the history of this SCSI internal interface card!
I ran an audio post production facility for 25 years and along the way we created solutions to our clients problems. Some were related to audio production and others pure IT data transfer facilities.
We are talking the late 1990's ~ early 2000's, it was a very different world in those days - Windows 98, XP & Server 2003 were the Microsoft platforms used, alongside Apple gear.
Actually my personal technical history goes a lot further back in time, in the 1980's remember S100 buss industrial machines (some were made here in Seven Hills, Sydney), PDP-11's, VAX servers from Digital Equipment Corporation, 8 Inch Floppy Drives (those were REALLY FLOPPY! and 5.25" had not been released yet!), DOS in it's many, many variants (not only Microsoft produced "DOS"), the Basic programming language and who could forget Windows 2.0/2.11/3.0/3.1 (Urghhhh)
Motherboards sported ISA buss slots with perhaps some of the "new" ubeaut PCI stuff if you could afford it. Most interfacing to peripherals such as ZIP drives, some CD readers or writers was via IDE but other devices used SCSI Ultrafast interfaces e.g hard drives for faster throughput.
This card is a card from one of our systems, interfacing a 32 bit system via a PCI slot to SCSI interface, both Ultrafast and "Standard"
The big STEEL cased cabinet you see pictured was originally a custom made CD duplication machine imported from Trace Duplication (USA). We upgraded that manually operated duplication system to a wonderful (well, wonderful most of the time!) fully automatic CD media 6 arm robotic machine which was a wonder to behold, while it worked correctly! Sometimes it would lose track of what it was doing and would pickup CDr media for writing and then the robot would start throwing the CDr's around the room like frisbees! Imagine walking into the duplication room to start work in the morning and the robots have been playing "frisbee" all night long, throwing CDr's all around the room! Funny (the joke was that the machine was having some "down time", playing frisbies instead of working) but serious at the same time, that was clients music flying all around the duplication room!
Over time, the original manual duplicator tower unit (pictured) had a myriad of extra SCSI peripherals connected to it so that we could easily take data from many different sources for straight transfer to other media or conversion and even some copy protected decryption at times. That is why you can see various CD drives and the ZIP drive in the front and other external DLT and assorted tape drives would "hang off" the SCSI buss accessed from the rear of the unit.
My wordee this original manual duplication tower is now VERY OLD technology and I see no point in keeping this unit complete so I am parting out the various components that may be of interest to others - not generally for the home computer user but some specialised industrial machines still use the SCSI architecture.
To see the other SCSI items (and I am adding more each day when I have spare time), click HERE
So, after that long introduction, let's get down to describing this component ....
ADAPTEC - SCSI bus controller card
Made in Singapore
Dates from around 2000!
Model: 29160N
32 bit
PCI buss architecture
Three ports:
68 pin LVD Ultra Fast
50 pin standard
50 pin standard high density connector (rear for external cabling)
NO cables provided although I do have some SCSI internal and perhaps (if I find them) some external cables
NO drivers supplied, you will need to source these yourself. I have seen a number of sites with drivers available for download, including Adaptec themselves. Seems that drivers are generally available for up to Win 7 and a few different "flavours" of Linux, including source code.
If you are hunting for Win/Linux drivers, take a look HERE at Adaptec's site
COSMETIC CONDITION:
USED
Clean
NO physical damage to the card (either side)
TESTING:
Actually the last time this card was in use was way back in 2007! Being part of a tower DAW system at the time, running a number of SCSI Wide hard drives and other peripheral devices. The equipment was "retired" from service and has been sitting in the backroom (Rest Home for old equipment) ever since. Recently I decided to "part out" the tower system but have been unable to re-confirm the functionality of the card because I cannot start up the machine any longer (no 9 pin mouse and no 5 pin DIN keyboard, so I cannot get past the POST when powering up the machine)
I just have to assume that all is still well with the card, it was 15 years ago!
Removal of the card from the system was undertaken using ESD safe precautions and the card is now safely packed within an ESD sealed packet awaiting a new owner.
