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I'd rather not need to drag out an old PC just to be able to clone/backup/format/etc. the sgi scsi hdd's.
Apparently PCI-Express SCSI cards are a bit rare, not many choices.
adaptec 29320LPE is about $200... expensive, seems to be the only adaptec card with pci-e.
LSI Logic LSI20320IE $30... this one is more common and cheap, i know LSI makes good stuff.
question is, will either of these actually work to do what we wanted to do with them???
because if I use an older linux in vmware for the Irix FS support, it may not have the driver for these newer pci-e scsi cards.

windows10 is removing scsi support almost entirely like you said
you can get a non-signed driver to work on that adaptec card so it works in win10 but you have to jump thru a lot of hoops to make it work.
the old driver from win2008 supposedly works on win10 for the LSI card, not sure if it still does or if win10 got patched and removed support.
but using these this way I still won't have the irix fs support, right?

I don't really need irix-fs support unless I want to view/modify the files of the filesystem right?
I should still be able to clone or do other stuff to the disk just fine? what about partitioning/formatting it?
so, do you think I should try getting that LSI card and set it up on vmware?
if the host machine has no driver for it, just the virtual machine does, the hardware will work?

OK so my plan is:
#1 I get the LSI pcie scsi card, use it in win10 or vmware linux to create a cloned image file of my sgi 18GB hdd. that way I can restore it to the hdd if I make a mistake.
#2 I'm going to get a hdd from ian's sgi depot with irix pre-installed, and I'm gonna boot from it, and access my 18GB hdd to modify the root password.
#3 Then I'm gonna swap the boot order in the bios, or just swap them physically, to boot from the 18GB hdd, and see whats in there.
does this sound like it will work?