If you’re in the data storage industry, you’ve no doubt heard the term “SCSI”, which is pronounced “SKUZ-ee.” The most common reaction is “say what?”

Yet SCSI has been around since 1986. To put that date in context, it was the same year email started being widely used and the Oprah Winfrey Show debuted nationally.

SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface ─ a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices such as hard disk drives and solid-state disk drives.

The SCSI interface is faster, more flexible and more reliable than its predecessor SATA, which is why it became the most widely used interface in servers and storage. It was so well designed in fact, that it was adopted by other storage technologies, such as USB, Fibre Channel, 1394 and InfiniBand.

Now that you know what SCSI is, consider yourself dangerous! And if you’re a visual learner, tune in and subscribe to our YouTube channel to hear this explanation from the SCSI Trade Association’s president Cameron Brett here.