Specifications

47
SCSI-BUS TERMINATION
To provide error-free operation of the SCSI bus system, it is absolutely necessary that the
SCSI bus is electrically terminated in a correct way. You can imagine the SCSI bus being a
single cable which must be actively terminated at each ends of the cable. The individual
SCSI devices are then being connected to the cable directly between these terminated ends,
and the SCSI controller itself also acts as a SCSI device (please also see Figure 7).
In the real-world application this means that the first and the last SCSI device in the SCSI
chain must be actively terminated, and the connection to the controller must be made
somewhere between the first and the last device. There is also one special case, which is the
possible translation from a WIDE SCSI bus (16 bit data) to a Fast SCSI bus (8 bit data). At
this point, all data lines which are only implemented on the WIDE SCSI bus (the upper 8 data
lines) must be terminated actively, while the lower 8 data lines must then be terminated at
the end of the Fast SCSI bus. Therefore it is necessary to use WIDE to Fast SCSI adaptors
with the described integrated termination when Fast SCSI devices shall be connected to the
CYBERSTORM PPC SCSI controller.
The CYBERSTORM PPC SCSI controller doesn't have an own active termination, as there
are too many possible custom configurations. The termination will be done either with SCSI
devices at the end of the chain, or - in case only one SCSI device is connected to the SCSI
bus - with an additional active terminator (see Figure 8).
Figure 8.
A correct connected
Ultra-WIDE-SCSI
harddrive
on the
CYBERSTORM PPC
Ultra-Wide-SCSI
Controller
connector of the Ultra-
WIDE-SCSI Controller
on the CYBERSTORM PPC
activ
terminated
Ultra-Wide-SCSI
harddisk
active
terminator
Older SCSI devices such as hard disks, removable drives, or streamers mostly have passive
terminators installed. These terminators are usually located nearby the SCSI connector of the
device. These passive terminators can not be used on the SCSI bus of the CYBERSTORM
PPC SCSI controller, and must always be removed as the SCSI bus must be actively
terminated. If these passive termination resistors (usually resistor arrays) are not socketed,
which is sometimes the case with devices where the termination resistors are SMD soldered,
they can usually be disabled by a jumper or a switch on the SCSI devices. In any case,
please refer to the
PowerUP - Amiga Goes PowerPC
http://powerup.amigaworld.de