SCSI

Index:-

1. Introduction
2. History
3. Working
4. Types of Cabling
5. Working of SCSI

1. Introduction:-

Small Computer System Interface, or SCSI (pronounced skuzzy), is a set of

standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and
peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, and electrical
and optical interfaces. SCSI is most commonly used for hard disks and tape drives,
but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives.
The SCSI standard defines command sets for specific peripheral device types; the
presence of "unknown" as one of these types means that in theory it can be used as
an interface to almost any device, but the standard is highly pragmatic and
addressed toward commercial requirements.

SCSI is an intelligent, peripheral, buffered, peer to peer interface. It hides the

complexity of physical format. Every device attaches to the SCSI bus in a similar
manner. Up to 8 or 16 devices can be attached to a single bus. There can be any
number of hosts and peripheral devices but there should be at least one host. SCSI
uses hand shake signals between devices, SCSI-1, SCSI-2 have the option of parity
error checking. Starting with SCSI-U160 (part of SCSI-3) all commands and data
are error checked by a CRC32 checksum. The SCSI protocol defines
communication from host to host, host to a peripheral device, and peripheral
device to a peripheral device. However most peripheral devices are exclusively
 SCSI

SCSI targets, incapable of acting as SCSI initiators—unable to initiate SCSI

transactions themselves. Therefore peripheral-to-peripheral communications are
uncommon, but possible in most SCSI applications. The Symbios Logic 53C810
chip is an example of a PCI host interface that can act as a SCSI target.

A SCSI connector is used to connect together computer parts that use a system
called SCSI to communicate with each other. Generally, two connectors,
designated male and female, plug together to form a connection which allows two
components, such as a computer and a disk drive, to communicate with each other.
SCSI connectors can be electrical connectors or optical connectors.

A "Mac Stack" of external SCSI devices displaying various SCSI connectors

There have been a large variety of SCSI connectors in use at one time or another in
the computer industry. Probably no computer interconnect (with the possible
exception of RS-232 serial) has caused as much confusion. Twenty-five years of
evolution and three major revisions of the standards resulted in requirements for
Parallel SCSI connectors that could handle an 8, 16 or 32 bit wide bus running at 5,
10 or 20 Mb/s, with conventional or differential signaling. Serial SCSI added
another three transport types, each with one or more connector types.
Manufacturers have frequently chosen connectors based on factors of size, cost, or
convenience at the expense of compatibility.
 SCSI

SCSI often makes use of cables to connect devices together; in a typical example, a
socket on a computer motherboard would have one end of a cable plugged into it,
while the other end of the cable plugged into a disk drive or other device. This
would mean that four connectors were involved in wiring the disk drive and
computer together: the connector on the motherboard, the connectors at each end
of the cable, and the connector on the disk drive. It is sometimes possible to have
cables which have different types of connectors on them, and some cables can have
as many as 16 connectors (allowing 16 devices to be wired together). Some types
of connectors are typically used inside a computer or disk drive case, while others
are used to connect a computer to a separate device such as a scanner or external
disk drive.

2. History :-

SCSI was derived from "SASI", the "Shugart Associates System Interface",
developed c. 1978 and publicly disclosed in 1981. A SASI controller provided a
bridge between a hard disk drive's low-level interface and a host computer, which
needed to read blocks of data. SASI controller boards were typically the size of a
hard disk drive and were usually physically mounted to the drive's chassis. SASI,
which was used in mini- and early microcomputers, defined the interface as using a
50-pin flat ribbon connector which was adopted as the SCSI-1 connector. SASI is a
 SCSI

fully compliant subset of SCSI-1 so that many, if not all, of the then existing SASI
controllers were SCSI-1 compatible.

Larry Boucher is considered to be the "father" of SASI and SCSI due to his
pioneering work first at Shugart Associates and then at Adaptec.

Until at least February 1982, ANSI developed the specification as "SASI" and
"Shugart Associates System Interface;" however, the committee documenting the
standard would not allow it to be named after a company. Almost a full day was
devoted to agreeing to name the standard "Small Computer System Interface,"
which Boucher intended to be pronounced "skuzzy", but ENDL's Dal Allan
pronounced the new acronym as "skuzzy" and that stuck.

A number of companies such as NCR Corporation, Adaptec and Optimem were

early supporters of the SCSI standard. The NCR facility in Wichita, Kansas may
have developed the industry's first SCSI chip; it worked the first time.

The "small" part in SCSI is historical; since the mid-1990s, SCSI has been
available on even the largest of computer systems.

Since its standardization in 1986, SCSI has been commonly used in the Amiga,
Apple Macintosh and Sun Microsystems computer lines and PC server systems.
Apple started using Parallel ATA (also known as IDE) for its low-end machines
with the Macintosh Quadra 630 in 1994, and added it to its high-end desktops
starting with the Power Macintosh G3 in 1997. Apple dropped on-board SCSI
completely (in favor of IDE and FireWire) with the (Blue & White) Power Mac G3
in 1999. Sun has switched its lower end range to Serial ATA (SATA). SCSI has
never been popular in the low-priced IBM PC world, owing to the lower cost and
adequate performance of ATA hard disk standard. SCSI drives and even SCSI
RAIDs became common in PC workstations for video or audio production, but the
appearance of large cheap SATA drives means that SATA is rapidly taking over
this market.

Three recent versions of SCSI—Serial Storage Architecture (SSA), SCSI-over-

Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP), and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)—break from the
traditional parallel SCSI standards and perform data transfer via serial
communications. Although much of the documentation of SCSI talks about the
parallel interface, most contemporary development effort is on serial SCSI. Serial
SCSI has a number of advantages over parallel SCSI: faster data rates, hot
swapping (some but not all parallel SCSI interfaces support it), and improved fault
isolation. The primary reason for the shift to serial interfaces is the clock skew
 SCSI

issue of high speed parallel interfaces, which makes the faster variants of parallel
SCSI susceptible to problems caused by cabling and termination. Serial SCSI
devices are more expensive than the equivalent parallel SCSI devices, but this is
likely to change soon.

ISCSI preserves the basic SCSI paradigm, especially the command set, almost
unchanged, through embedding of SCSI-3 over TCP/IP.

SCSI is popular on high-performance workstations and servers. RAIDs on servers

almost always use SCSI hard disks, though a number of manufacturers offer
SATA-based RAID systems as a cheaper option. Desktop computers and
notebooks more typically use the ATA/IDE or the newer SATA interfaces for hard
disks, and USB, eSATA, and FireWire connections for external devices.

3. Interfaces of SCSI:-

SCSI is available in a variety of interfaces. The first, still very common, was
parallel SCSI (now also called SPI), which uses a parallel electrical bus design.
As of 2008, SPI is being replaced by Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), which uses a
serial design but retains other aspects of the technology. ISCSI drops physical
implementation entirely, and instead uses TCP/IP as a transport mechanism.
Many other interfaces which do not rely on complete SCSI standards still
implement the SCSI command protocol.
 SCSI

SCSI interfaces have often been included on computers from various

manufacturers for use under Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, UNIX and Linux
operating systems, either implemented on the motherboard or by the means of
plug-in adaptors. With the advent of SAS and SATA drives, provision for SCSI
on motherboards is being discontinued. A few companies still market SCSI
interfaces for motherboards supporting PCIe and PCI-X.

4. Working :-

SCSI uses a protocol method to transfer data between devices on the bus. It is a
circular process which starts and ends up in the same layer. From the first layer, all
additional layers of protocol must be executed before any data is transferred to or
from another device and the layers of protocol must be completed after the data has
been transferred to the end of the process. The protocol layers are referred to as
"SCSI bus phases". These phases are:

 BUS FREE
 ARBITRATION
 SELECTION
 MESSAGE OUT
 COMMAND OUT
 DATA OUT/IN
 STATUS IN
 MESSAGE IN
 RESELECTION

The SCSI bus can be in only one phase at a given time.

Not all controllers use all the phases and a well written driver will not assume that
phases will occur but rather command an operation then read status to determine
the phase that the device wants to do next. This technique allows a single driver to
 SCSI

work with a variety of controllers that may vary in whether they drop unneeded
phases or not. In early implementations of SCSI, writing a single driver to work
with Xebec and DTC required this approach developed by Douglas Goodall while
adding SCSI support to the Ampro Little Board Z80.

SCSI Device Identification:-

In the modern SCSI transport protocols; there is an automated process of

"discovery" of the IDs. SSA initiators "walk the loop" to determine what devices
are there and then assign each one a 7-bit "hop-count" value. FC-AL initiators use
the LIP (Loop Initialization Protocol) to interrogate each device port for its WWN
(World Wide Name). For iSCSI, because of the unlimited scope of the (IP)
network, the process is quite complicated. These discovery processes occur at
power-on/initialization time and also if the bus topology changes later, for example
if an extra device is added.

On a parallel SCSI bus, a device (e.g. host adapter, disk drive) is identified by a
"SCSI ID", which is a number in the range 0-7 on a narrow bus and in the range 0–
15 on a wide bus. On earlier models a physical jumper or switch controls the SCSI
ID of the initiator (host adapter). On modern host adapters (since about 1997),
doing I/O to the adapter sets the SCSI ID; for example, the adapter often contains a
BIOS program that runs when the computer boots up and that program has menus
that let the operator choose the SCSI ID of the host adapter. Alternatively, the host
adapter may come with software that must be installed on the host computer to
configure the SCSI ID. The traditional SCSI ID for a host adapter is 7, as that ID
has the highest priority during bus arbitration (even on a 16 bit bus).

The SCSI ID of a device in a drive enclosure that has a backplane is set either by
jumpers or by the slot in the enclosure the device is installed into, depending on the
model of the enclosure. In the latter case, each slot on the enclosure's back plane
delivers control signals to the drive to select a unique SCSI ID. A SCSI enclosure
without a back plane often has a switch for each drive to choose the drive's SCSI
ID. The enclosure is packaged with connectors that must be plugged into the drive
where the jumpers are typically located; the switch emulates the necessary
jumpers. While there is no standard that makes this work, drive designers typically
set up their jumper headers in a consistent format that matches the way that these
switches implement.

Note that a SCSI target device (which can be called a "physical unit") is often
divided into smaller "logical units." For example, a high-end disk subsystem may
 SCSI

be a single SCSI device but contain dozens of individual disk drives, each of which
is a logical unit (more commonly, it is not that simple—virtual disk devices are
generated by the subsystem based on the storage in those physical drives, and each
virtual disk device is a logical unit). The SCSI ID, WWN, etc. in this case
identifies the whole subsystem, and a second number, the logical unit number
(LUN) identifies a disk device within the subsystem.

It is quite common, though incorrect, to refer to the logical unit itself as a "LUN."
Accordingly, the actual LUN may be called a "LUN number" or "LUN id".

Setting the bootable (or first) hard disk to SCSI ID 0 is an accepted IT community
recommendation. SCSI ID 2 is usually set aside for the floppy disk drive while
SCSI ID 3 is typically for a CD-ROM drive.