Adaptec AHA-2740A EISA Fast SCSI Host Adapter Card AIC-7770 577000-01

Adaptec AHA-2740A EISA Fast SCSI Host Adapter Card AIC-7770 577000-01

The Adaptec AHA-2740A is an EISA-bus Fast SCSI-2 host adapter card built around the Adaptec AIC-7770 controller chipset. It connects EISA-slot workstations and servers to Fast SCSI (SCSI-2) devices — including hard drives, tape drives, optical drives, and scanners — delivering the higher throughput of Fast SCSI over the wide 32-bit EISA bus. The date code on the chip label (9727) places this card's manufacture in mid-1997, squarely in the era of high-end EISA workstations and servers from vendors such as Compaq, HP, and AST.

Specifications & What's Included

• Model: Adaptec AHA-2740A
• Part Number: 577000-01 (revision F, per chip label)
• Controller Chipset: Adaptec AIC-7770
• Bus Interface: EISA (32-bit)
• SCSI Standard: Fast SCSI (SCSI-2), single-ended
• External Connector: 50-pin Centronics (SCSI-2) on bracket
• Internal Connector: 50-pin IDC ribbon header on PCB
• Form Factor: Full-length EISA expansion card with standard bracket
• Date Code: 9727 (week 27, 1997)
• Includes: Card only — no SCSI cables or accessories included

Applications

The AHA-2740A was designed for EISA-bus workstations and servers that required faster SCSI-2 performance than the older SCSI-1 standard could deliver. EISA (Extended Industry Standard Architecture) was a 32-bit expansion bus introduced in the late 1980s as an open alternative to IBM's MCA bus, and it was widely adopted in high-performance PCs, workstations, and servers from Compaq, HP (Hewlett-Packard), AST, and others through the mid-1990s. In these systems, a host adapter like the AHA-2740A served as the bridge between the system's EISA bus and the SCSI storage subsystem — managing data transfers to and from hard drives, tape backup units, CD-ROM drives, and other SCSI peripherals. The Fast SCSI-2 standard supported transfer rates up to 10 MB/s, a meaningful improvement over the 5 MB/s of SCSI-1. Today, the AHA-2740A remains relevant for technicians maintaining, restoring, or expanding legacy EISA-based systems, as well as collectors of late-1980s through mid-1990s workstation-class hardware. Compatible systems include EISA-slot machines running DOS, Windows NT, NetWare, SCO Unix, and other operating systems of that era.