CompuServe Messages

No. The connector should never have been used for SCSI period (including SCSI-I). The inadvertant connection problem is certainly yet another consideration but not the primary one. The problem is that even SCSI-I bus speeds are high enough that you need a good quality "transmission line" for the signals. The 50 pin bus connectors provide this. The 25 pin is a kludge (and a poor one at that). Apple Macintosh started the whole thing of using a DB-25 for SCSI. On the Mac, the machine was quite slow (by scsi standards). When the Amiga came alone, they used the DB-25 for cost reasons but they also designed the fastest microprocessor based SCSI machine that the world had seen. The Amiga A2091/A3000 SCSI was fast enough that the marginal performance of the DB-25 became a serious issue. Even drives that are slightly marginal will often not work on an Amiga (or be "flakey") and yet be "solid" on other machines. With SCSI-II the problem is hopeless as far as the DB-25 is concerned. SCSI-II command/data duration is way too low for any sloppy design (the same reason that active termination is not an option on SCSI-II).