4
ARS-2017E Manual
Chapter 1 About SCSIDE
®
1.1 Revolutionary Technology
SCSIDE
®
is a revolutionary technology developed by ACARD Technology Corp. It
can transform IDE data into SCSI type, and save the expenditures. Through this
technology any inexpensive IDE device can have high-performance SCSI
applications. The following examples are some of the SCSIDE
®
applications.
1. To transform an IDE hard drive into an external SCSI one for notebook and desktop
PC users to back up data.
2. To transform an IDE CD/DVD drive into a SCSI one.
3. To daisy chain multiple SCSIDE
®
DVD-ROMs to create a DVD-ROM server.
4. To transform a DMA 133/100/66 hard drive of 5400rpm or 7200rpm into an LVD
SCSI one for PC, Unix workstations and servers.
The basic structure of SCSIDE
®
is ROC (RAID On Chip), which highly integrates
multiple CPUs. This ROC design is resulting from ACARD’s years of experiences in
the design of IDE, SCSI and RISC CPU chips. The block diagram on the next page
shows that ROC has multiple CPUs. Its ROM, RAM, DMA controllers and external
ROM interface can be used as the firmware update of flash ROM. ACARD has a
perfect firmware technology, too. It makes the transformation of IDE to SCSI an
actual “plug and play”. The firmware has been tested on almost all brands of IDE
DMA 133/100/66 hard drives and ATAPI CD/DVD drives. Whether your IDE device
is an ATA hard drive, or any of the ATAPI CD/DVD drives, you can all plug it and
enjoy the advantages of SCSI with ease. With the intelligent firmware design, you
don’t need to install a driver into the operating system to use SCSIDE
®
products. In
the operating system it is just like a SCSI device.