ATTO Technology, long known for their SCSI adapters for nonlinear editing systems and pre-press, has created the Express PCI-UL2D 64-bit dual channel Ultra2 SCSI adapter.  Each Ultra2 LVD SCSI channel supports a data transfer rate of 80 MB/second.  And data transfer speeds up to 160 MB/second are supported by striping hard drive arrays across channels.  ATTO SCSI adapters improve the performance of digital video workstations with the addition of their Advanced Data Streaming (ADS) technology.  ADS includes engineering designed features to increase the transfer of large amounts of data faster and more efficiently.  ADS includes an embedded RISC processor, accelerated PCI bus management, improved data interleave, optimized SCSI-3 algorithms for digital video, and full multi-block buffering.  The use of full multi-block buffering enables the Express PCI-UL2D to transfer 512 byte blocks using 1/3 of the PCI bandwidth used by other SCSI host adapters.

Ultra2 LVD SCSI increases the SCSI bus cable length to 12-meters, up from the 1.5 to 3-meter cable length of Ultra SCSI, allowing up to 15 devices to reside on each channel of the bus in real-life situations.  The Express PCI-UL2D spares a PCI slot, by combining two high performance Ultra2 LVD SCSI channels on a single board and supports 64-bit PCI slots and 32-bit PCI slots.

Specifications

Hardware Supported:  64-bit PCI Bus Mastered DMA backward compatible to 32-bit PCI.  PCI 2.1 compliant.

Operating Systems Supported:  Microsoft Windows 3.x/95/98/NT 4.0, and Windows 2000, Novell NetWare, Mac OS 7.5.2 or greater, UNIX, and MS-DOS

SCSI Supported

8-bit SCSI-1, 8-bit Ultra SCSI at 20 MB/second (requires 68-pin to 50-pin adapter), 16-bit Ultra SCSI at 40 MB/second, and 16-bit Ultra2 LVD SCSI at 80 MB/second.

Maximum Cable Length

As a single SCSI bus, the total maximum cable length is limited to the maximum of the connectors used, i.e., Ultra2 only 12-meters total; Fast and Fast Wide SCSI 3-meters total; Ultra SCSI 1.5-meters (8 devices) or 3-meters (4 devices) total.  A combination of SCSI types supports the smallest of the total cable lengths utilized as specified here.

Connectors

(1) External Ultra2 SCSI VHDCI and (1) Internal Ultra2 SCSI 68-pin high density.   

Advanced Features

Disconnect/Reconnect, Scatter/Gather, Tagged Command Queuing, Multiple Block Sizes, and Multithreaded I/O up to 255 simultaneous tasks.