Published on Jun 05, 2023
SCSI is actually an acronym for Small Computer System Interface and it is pronounced as "skuzzy". It is the second-most popular hard disk interface used in PCs today. It's a high-speed, intelligent peripheral I/O bus with a device independent protocol for transferring data between different types of peripheral devices.
The SCSI bus connects all parts of a computer system so that they can communicate with each other. The bus frees the host processor from the responsibility of I/O internal tasks. A SCSI bus can be either internal, external, or cross the boundary from internal to external. The SCSI protocol is a peer-to-peer relationship: one device does not have to be subordinated to another device in order to perform I/0 activities. Only two of these devices can communicate on the bus at any given time.
Each SCSI bus can connect up to 8 or up to 16 peripherals; one of those devices will always be the computer or the SCSI card, because they too are devices on the SCSI. SCSI devices are designated as either initiators (drivers) or targets (receivers) and the interface to the host computer is called the host adapter. Every device connected to the bus will have a different SCSI ID, ranging from 0 to 7. The host adapter takes up one ID leaving 7 ID's for other hardware.
SCSI hardware typically consists of hard drives, tape drives, CD-ROMs, printers and scanners. The reason for the slow taking of SCSI is the lack of standard. Each company seems to have its own idea of how SCSI should work. While the connections themselves have been standardized, the actual driver specs used for communication have not been. The end result is that each piece of SCSI hardware has its own host adapter. So, due to the lack of an adapter standard, a standardized software interface, and a standard BIOS for hard drives attached to the SCSI.
