SCSI pros & cons

From: Glen Goodwin <acme_ent_at_bellsouth.net>
Date: Thu Oct 11 22:51:37 2001

> Glen Goodwin skrev:
>
> >Hmm -- my personal experience is that, unless the machine is already
> >junked-up with a random assortment of TV and radio tuner cards, video
> >accelerators, SoundBlasters and DVD decoders, SCSI is easily added to a
> >motherboard with onboard IDE ports. I've personally built a few dozen
of
> >them, using both IDE and PCI SCSI controllers.
>
> >What sorts of problems are you encountering?

Iggy Drougge replied:
 
> You're welcome to try to sort out our pile of SCSI cards which so far
haven't
> worked in our OpenBSD machine.

One machine, or many? If you have a pile of cards, one machine, and none
of the cards work in that specific box, I'd suggest that there may be a
fault in the box, or another device in there which conflicts with your SCSI
cards.

> We don't use PCI cards, though (we sold that
> one, since we wouldn't use the SCSI for anything else than tapestreamers
and
> so forth). Besides, SCSI integration into PC systems is really clumsy.

Wow - these days the BIOS setup utility on the cards allows a lot of
flexibility and also provides information about the installed SCSI devices,
making it easy to verify IDs, etc.

A few years ago I was building 80MHz 486 systems using Rancho Technologies
RT1000 8-bit SCSI cards which I got for about $8 each. The cards were
shipped labeled "not Win95 compatible," but, not only did they work with
Win95, I never saw a faulty card, or a system in which the RT1000 wouldn't
work. (Okay, so they were *slow*)

So, my SCSI experiences have been good.

> and they don't behave like the IDE hard drives.

Well, that's the point, right? ;>)

> They
> have their own little BIOSes and things which I'm not used to from other
> systems.

Those little BIOSes (the ones with a setup program) are a *big* advantage.
Just today I was cursing the fact that the BIOS on the ATA-66 controller I
was installing didn't have a setup program. It took me two hours to get
all six IDE drives working properly. With a decent SCSI card it would have
been 15 minutes, tops (barring any bad drives or cables).

> In fact, non-PC systems tend to see IDE as a kind of bastard SCSI
> instead.

They may be onto something there . . .
 
Glen
0/0
Received on Thu Oct 11 2001 - 22:51:37 BST