[ The PC Guide | Systems and Components Reference Guide | Hard Disk Drives | Hard Disk Interfaces and Configuration | Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI) ]

SCSI Protocols and Interface Features

In detailing the various standards, transfers modes and feature sets associated with the SCSI interface, I have introduced several important concepts that define the attributes of various types of SCSI buses. New technologies are often introduced specifically to change these traits, to improve the interface. It's important to understand how the various aspects of SCSI combine to create different specific SCSI varieties.

In this section I describe the most important characteristics of the SCSI interface. This includes a discussion of the three most important defining characteristics of any SCSI bus: signaling, bus speed and bus width. I then discuss several important SCSI bus features, many of which have been introduced to improve performance or reliability on the newest, highest-performance SCSI implementations. This includes a discussion of bus integrity protection, and advanced features such as command queuing and reordering, domain validation, quick arbitration and selection, and packetization.

Next: Single-Ended (SE) and Differential (High Voltage Differential, HVD) Signaling

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