Be careful with SCSI adapters! Just fried my HDD. :(

#1 Mon, 10 Dec 2012 - 05:19 68kMLA

I just fried my new Ultra320 drive.

I found a different adapter and thought I'd give it a try. It looked more sophisticated (had 2 SCSI connectors instead of just 1), but it just ended up frying my HDD. It now longer powers up. Argh! Just a warning.

Fortunately the drive only cost me $6. I'll see if I can find another one.

#2 Mon, 10 Dec 2012 - 19:59 68kMLA

Is that card HVD or just marked Differential?

#3 Tue, 11 Dec 2012 - 02:52 68kMLA

I... don't know. I'd have to look.

#4 Tue, 11 Dec 2012 - 03:57 68kMLA

The card is LVD. initio NI-A100U2W Miles U2W SCSI card.

#5 Tue, 11 Dec 2012 - 05:14 68kMLA

Odd then, should have worked unless the HD is HVD. Was the drive working before?

#6 Tue, 11 Dec 2012 - 07:40 68kMLA

When I got my SGI Onyx the last owner that all hell had broken loose previously when an LVD drive was attached to the HVD scsi bus. Blew up the drive, blew up the SCSI controller and worse yet, killed the IO4 board. Nasty stuff.

#7 Tue, 11 Dec 2012 - 16:28 68kMLA

It's an Ultra320 SCSI drive. From what I understand, it should be LVD. I can take a picture of the adapter I used so you can see what the difference is. The plain Jane adapters had nothing special on them, just a resistor or two, and you can see the traces that reroute the power to the molex connector. Worked fine. The one I tried actually had some other chips on it, looked fancy. The HDD worked up until I plugged the fancy adapter in. After that, it would no longer power up.

#8 Wed, 12 Dec 2012 - 19:11 68kMLA

Here's a picture of the adapters. The top one is what killed my HDD (or at least, my HDD stopped working after I used it.) The bottom one is the generic adapter that I bought that was working fine previously.

#9 Wed, 12 Dec 2012 - 22:30 68kMLA

I wonder what those chips are for on the board?

#10 Thu, 13 Dec 2012 - 02:47 68kMLA

Well, I thought it looked neat and thought maybe it was self terminating. It's just that I didn't expect it to terminate my HDD in a different way.

)

#11 Thu, 13 Dec 2012 - 03:55 68kMLA

Probably power regs or termination.