[conspire] (forw) Re: June 25 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56 continuation

[Rick Moen]

----- Forwarded message from wood eddie <ewood111 at yahoo.com> -----

Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 17:08:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: wood eddie <ewood111 at yahoo.com>
To: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Subject: June 25 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56 continuation
X-Mailer: YahooMailClassic/14.0.3 YahooMailWebService/0.8.112.307740

Hi Rick:

Thanks again for great suppoort.  You are right again. I dropped by Frys
Sunnyvale[the big store I think] 8am this morning, to my surprise, asked
3 sales rep who tries to pass it on to the next person, finally one
person near the laptop area says they do not carry SCSI anymore as it
uses too much power, advise me to use USB or Firewire HD.

I almost gave up until your suggestion came.  I shall drop by HSC after
work today and check out their SCSI cables/adapter.  BTW, I am also
looking for a 50pin to 68 pin adapter, which Frys says they do not have.
Even Fry's web site do not carry this, when I ask the guy there to look
this up on their web site.

Thx. Eddie

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2011 17:23:15 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: wood eddie <ewood111 at yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: June 25 MP installfest upgrade RH 7.3 PC to Centos56
	continuation
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting wood eddie (ewood111 at yahoo.com):

> Thanks again for great suppoort.  You are right again. I dropped by
> Frys Sunnyvale[the big store I think] 8am this morning, to my
> surprise, asked 3 sales rep who tries to pass it on to the next
> person, finally one person near the laptop area says they do not carry
> SCSI anymore as it uses too much power, advise me to use USB or
> Firewire HD.

Translation:  'I'm completely out of my depth, and am going to steer 
conversation back to something where I might have some possibility of
knowing something, and also into an area where Fry's offers cheap
commodity gear.'

> I almost gave up until your suggestion came.  I shall drop by HSC 
> after work today and check out their SCSI cables/adapter.  

HSC _or_ Weird Stuff would be the obvious in-person places.  Of course,
you can also get a huge selection of such gear in both new and used
variations online, but with the obvious disadvantage of no instant
availability.

> BTW, I am also looking for a 50pin to 68 pin adapter, which Frys says
> they do not have. Even Fry's web site do not carry this, when I ask
> the guy there to look this up on their web site.

I'm conflicted, as to what advice to give you:

If you have both 50-pin / 8-bit 'Narrow SCSI' devices (very old flatbed
scanners, very old SCSI hard drives) and 68-pin / 16-bit 'Wide SCSI'
devices, you may be better off separating and putting each set on a
different chain, i.e., have a Wide SCSI chain and a Narrow SCSI chain.

Or you might consider replacing the narrow-SCSI gear with inexpensive
wide-SCSI replacements.  

I realise you're doubtless trying to just make everything compatible,
so there's nothing wrong with looking for a narrow-to-wide converter.

Here's what looks like a reasonable field guide to SCSI hardware of the
various generations going back about 25 years:
http://www.datapro.net/techinfo/scsi_doc.html

----- End forwarded message -----