For about 20 years, Adaptec was synonymous with SCSI controllers for PCs. Their controllers were frequently imitated, and its competitors undercut them in price. But the reliability, performance, and compatibility of Adaptec products was tough to beat. So if you wanted the very best, you bought Adaptec. In this blog post, I’ll uncover what happened to Adaptec. Hint: they didn’t go out of business.
Adaptec: When second-best wouldn’t do
The servers that I worked on from 1997 to 2009 more often than not contained an Adaptec SCSI or RAID adapter. And when they didn’t contain an Adaptec adapter, they usually contained one made by Future Domain, a company Adaptec acquired.
I owned a number of Adaptec cards over the years as well. When I built a video editing workstation in the early 2000s, I put an Adaptec 29160 card in it. Around the same time, Adaptec 2940 cards started getting really inexpensive, so I came into the possession of a couple of those as well. One of the early iterations of this website ran on a server with a 2940 in it. While they were borderline obsolete for enterprise use by then, they were still very useful on a smaller scale, like a personal web server.
Going back a few more years, the ISA Adaptec 1542CF is legendary. Not only was it the best SCSI controller of its generation, but the N82077SL floppy controller in it was the best of its generation. If you have a retro PC you use to write disk images, it’s worth getting an Adaptec 1542 as an easy way to ensure you have the best-available floppy controller. Adaptec’s products carried a premium price, but they delivered quality in return.
Adaptec software
Adaptec also produced software. If you wanted to burn a CD in the mid 90s, you may very well have used EZ CD Creator on Windows or Toast on a Mac. Adaptec divested its software business in 2001, spinning it off as Roxio. Roxio changed hands between a number of storied companies after the divestiture. Sonic, of DivX fame, owned it for a while, as did Rovi. Rovi was also known as Macrovision, and for a while, also owned TiVO. The irony of two companies who were big names in copy prevention technology owning CD burning software makes sense if you think about it.
Adaptec’s exit from storage and technology
Demand for Adaptec products started to wane in the early 2000s, as serial ATA mostly caught up with SCSI performance, and USB replaced SCSI as the preferred method for connecting external devices such as scanners and storage devices. Arguably, SCSI was better when it was working properly. But serial ATA and USB were much easier to set up, as well as cheaper.
Adaptec exited the storage business in 2010. But it didn’t discontinue the products, and it didn’t go out of business. Instead, the company took a road less traveled and changed its business model. Adaptec sold its data storage business to PMC-Sierra in 2010 for $34 billion, and then in subsequent years changed its name twice, first to ADPT, then to Steel Excel. It is now an investment firm, so any involvement it has with the technology field today is strictly indirect.
Adaptec’s storage business changed hands several times after 2010, first to Microsemi in 2016, then to Microchip in 2018. The technology related to the former Adaptec storage business now belongs to Microchip.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
I feel like those old controllers deserve a new lease on life with all the SCSI drive emulators that are now available.
On the Amiga, SCSI was the standard, of course. I think most Amiga controllers used a WD SCSI controller ship. I wonder if performance would have been (even) better if they had adapted Adaptec’s chip instead.
Is there a SCSI drive emulator you prefer? I’d really like to get one so I can use my Adaptec 1542CF in my IBM 5170, but the ones I’ve looked at seem hyperfocused on Macs so it makes me nervous.