Ultra 3 SCSI ready to dawn

The SCSI Trade Association has announced the release of Ultra 160/M SCSI, an implementation based on Ultra 3 SCSI and intended to provide speeds of 160Mbps. The announcement received broad support from a number of vendors including Quantum, Adaptec, Fujitsu, HP, Mylex, Qlogic, IBM, Seagate, Western Digital and others. Quantum said earlier this year that it was delaying an implementation it had for fibre channel in favour of SCSI because it believed that the latter offered a more standard interface. Products using Ultra 3 SCSI will begin to appear next year and will, according to the association, offer more bandwidth and better reliability. Features of Ultra 3 SCSI will include double transition clocking, which will give the higher speeds, domain validation, packetisation, cyclic redundancy check (CRC) and quick arbitration check. The last of these allows for better arbitration performance to reduce disconnect and reconnect time on the bus. See The SCSI Trade Association Web site. ®