Is There a Single-Ended Wide-Ultra-SCSI SBus card?

Back in the day, Sun Microsystems manufactured many models of plug-in SCSI controller cards for their SBus-based SPARC workstations, including the following SCSI varieties:

However, Sun never manufactured a Single-Ended Wide Ultra SCSI (40 MB/sec) SBus card (they did make a PCI card version based on the Qlogic ISP-1040B, but that doesn't help SBus-only systems). Thus one might presume that to the only way to get more than 20 MB/sec SCSI on SBus systems, you would have to use an external HVD-SCSI storage array and one of the Sun HVD SCSI cards.

Fortunately, that's not quite the case - at least one third-party manufacturer filled that particular gap, providing a way to use *internal* drives on a 40 MB/sec single-ended SCSI bus...

Antares Microsystems

In the 1990s, Antares Microsystems manufactured a huge range of SBus cards, for all kinds of purposes, some quite unusual. Amongst the most handy are the later range of SBus SCSI host adaptors that have an *internal* SCSI connector:

Part No.HBA typeMax SCSI ThroughputSCSI controller core
20-050-0050High-Voltage-Differential Wide Fast SCSI20 MB/secQlogic ISP-1000 SCSI core
20-050-0051Single-Ended Wide Fast SCSI20 MB/secQlogic ISP-1000 SCSI core
20-050-0060High-Voltage-Differential Wide Ultra SCSI40 MB/secQlogic ISP-1000U SCSI core
20-050-0061Single-Ended Wide Ultra SCSI40 MB/secQlogic ISP-1000U SCSI core

Interesting enough, these cards are all silkscreened "FWS" (Fast Wide SCSI) but the 0060 and 0061 really are Ultra (Wide) SCSI, using the same PCB but an ISP-1000U chip in place of the "plain" ISP-1000.

A handy feature of these cards is that they use the same "fas" and "isp" device-drivers as the Sun cards, so will work "as is" with stock Solaris 2.6 and later editions.

Be Careful When Procuring

When looking to obtain the SE Wide Ultra-SCSI version on eg: eBay, craigslist, Amazon, miscellaneous surplus stockists, etc, you need to be careful with the part numbers: these days, most such suppliers don't know what they actually have, and fling incorrect part-numbers around with wild abandon.

Ask to see high-res pictures beforehand if at all possible. The HVD cards have vertically-standing yellow rectangular components on them (presumably something to do with HVD signal drive?).


21st October 2017
Errors and omissions are due to mikes@aalin.co.uk