joey@cs.utexas.edu (Joe Pruett) (03/08/90)
Adaptec does make a board that will control SMD drives and talk SCSI out the other side. I think the part number was ADP-5580. It could control up to 4 drives of "any" geometry. It was only asynch, so throughput is only 1.5MB/sec. I was interested in the same thing (hooking SMD drives up to the sparcstation). Since the board didn't do synch SCSI it wasn't very attractive, and they weren't very interested in updating to synch mode. If enough people bug them, they might get interested in updating to synch and pushing it into the sun market... Price was around $800. Some tape drive vendors now sell boards to adapt their drives to SCSI, you might look into that. I'm pretty sure I've seen a generic board that converts SCSI to PERTEC.