Im guessing its the upside down connector 🤣

No doubt this would cause a few issues for the controller.

shamino wrote on 2022-03-24, 08:52:

I've had this SCSI cable for 20 years. 50pin SCSI cable backwards key - was in Kayak 533x600.jpg I just accidentally noticed thi […]
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I've had this SCSI cable for 20 years.
50pin SCSI cable backwards key - was in Kayak 533x600.jpg
I just accidentally noticed this today. I stared at it. I can't be seeing what I'm seeing.

Now I'm thinking back to all the little SCSI episodes over the years when I couldn't get something to work right. And the fact that I never had 2 drives running at the same time on this cable. Or apparently, anything ever working on the last connector. Suddenly some past mysteries make sense.

I just want to offer a big FU to whoever designed this cable. I mean what the hell man.

Oh fuck.. One of the connectors is reversed. WTF.. 🤣!

Ah, well, the other day there was a horse, vomiting in front of a pharmacy, you know?

appiah4 wrote on 2022-03-24, 09:13:

Oh fuck.. One of the connectors is reversed. WTF.. 🤣!

Didn't quite get it until I read the OT's description. Subtle but deadly.

I guess, underpaid Chinese factory staff screw up just as much as the next fellow human being?

Reminds me how I got my first and last "drive bay multi card reader"...
In a respectable German retail outlet in in nice part of a nice town.

By the photos, that was supposed to have a 3.5" floppy molex, the smaller one. Which usually clearly snaps into place and is mechanically coded, i.e. non-reversable.

Alas, the factory must have run out of those and simply installed some similar connector that fit somehow, but not quite and lacked the coding and did not lock.
- And no markings on the PCB which side is which.
- And the "manual" was a single sheet in greyscale photocopy. No way of telling red from yellow.

Had to figure it out with try & error and did, but fried my prized "Logitech Mouseman Optical" in the process.

Got the advice that if needed "professionally" (I was a student...) one can demand a full refund instead of mere replacement - even in "the custumer is a dip shit" Germany.
Was so pissed off that I actually went full Karen on the shop.
They gave me the refund but uttered the German equivalent of "stfu" in the process.

They completely were not understanding or refusing to acknowledge the connector issue.
I went back to buying online...

@Cuttoon - ouch. Power cables are a much more destructive affair, it really sucks to have a screwup with those.

I found mention on an old newsgroup post about some IBMs having SCSI cables with a backwards connector like this for some reason. I got this out of an HP, but I really don't remember if it came with that machine or if I added it. Back then I just used it for a single CD-ROM drive. It might have even come with the drive.

A couple years ago I bought a seemingly NOS mid-90s SCSI hard drive (probably a server backup) that I wanted to use in a Pentium. There were 2 obstacles with that drive.
The 1st obstacle was that it's an HVD (high voltage differential) drive, which needs it's own type of controller card and terminator. So I tracked that stuff down, the card was easy but the terminators were obscure and pricey. At least they came in a lot of 4, so I'm set for life, right?
The 2nd obstacle was when the drive got detected with 0MB capacity. The drive has Unisys firmware which might use an odd sector size - I thought I could fix this with low level formatting, but that operation failed to do anything at all.

Now I'm realizing that the reason the drive didn't work properly might have simply been because of a backwards terminator, thanks to this cable. I need to try it again - but now I've misplaced those HVD terminators. All 4 of them.