IDE-SATA adapters are very common (and cheap), but this seems like SCSI-SATA which is definitely far less common; I know there is also SAS, but I'm not sure how that compares. There have been IDE-SCSI adapters made in the past too, but they've also become rare and expensive:
as well as the device being firmware upgradable via USB
My first thought upon reading that was "that seems overly complex". Looking at the rest of the features, this seems more like an embedded system doing the translation rather than a simple (hardware IP) adapter.
SAS is basically two channel SATA with independent command queues, and can drive SATA drives, but SATA can't drive SAS.
SATA at 600MB/sec is plenty fast for contemporary mainstream server applications , which you can scale up with RAID 5/6/10 with some error resilience.
For higher throughput (plus more IOPS generally), SAS RAID comes into play. AI and processing servers generally come with NVMe disk stacks, configured with mdraid / RAID 0 generally, because the data is generally ephemeral, so losing the data is highly unlikely. You restart what you do on an other server, most of the time.
There's probably an FPGA or fast DSP which can handle signal/protocol translation with some state handling coprocessor on board, not unlike a (spinning) disk controller.
There's a server room right down the hallway with racks of SCSI and SAS drives, some even running 2007 Opterons. I have no clue who's using them, but there's a ton of spares in the room leading into it, so there's definitely demand for these things.
As with all technologies though, the cost first starts out high as it's introduced, is reduced as it becomes popular, and climbs back up as it's obsoleted and nobody makes them anymore but some people are stuck using them.
They look to be a bit more flexible, with the ability to mimic the firmware of specific drives. They also seem to be a bit older - I don't think BlueSCSI supports CF cards, and these don't seem like they support Wi-Fi.
the reality of debugging novel SCSI drivers is not for the weak. The layered, embedded and terse protocols that pass through those wires have tons of legacy junk and 80s engineering thinking .. like saving 5 bytes by combining into awkward flags.
Serial connections can actually be faster in practice due to syncing problems of parallel (SCSI-like) transfers at speed.
This is pretty interesting as a retro PC hobbyist. I have Pentium 3 1400-S rig currently running an Adaptec PCI-to-SATA adapter but have a few SCSI drives laying around, so I'm thinking about running the system on SCSI instead of SATA. Probably won't feel as fast but it would feel more "workstation-y". Did anyone run SCSI on a P3 system back in the day?
I still use SCSI on my old AKAI samplers..both external Jaz Drives (which I use less frequently), and internal Zulu SCSI / SCSI2SD which are awesome. Long live SCSI.
IDE-SATA adapters are very common (and cheap), but this seems like SCSI-SATA which is definitely far less common; I know there is also SAS, but I'm not sure how that compares. There have been IDE-SCSI adapters made in the past too, but they've also become rare and expensive:
https://duxbridge.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/creating-ssd-for-...
as well as the device being firmware upgradable via USB
My first thought upon reading that was "that seems overly complex". Looking at the rest of the features, this seems more like an embedded system doing the translation rather than a simple (hardware IP) adapter.