SCSI pros & cons

From: Roger Merchberger <zmerch_at_30below.com>
Date: Fri Oct 12 08:58:01 2001

Rumor has it that Iggy Drougge may have mentioned these words:
>Glen Goodwin skrev:
>
> >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.
>
>Who cares what the cause is? The point is that it won't work.

If the cause is the motherboard, you can't (justly) accuse the SCSI card of
being the problem...

>I see that BIOS setup utility on the cards as a sympthom of the low level of
>integration. The cards behave as an alien entity in the computer.

With my job, one realizes that *every* card is an alien entity -- I've had
*much* less heartburn getting add-on SCSI cards to work compared to
PCI-based add-on IDE cards (which, BTW, have their own BIOS too - and a
much more useless one at that...) and you apparently have never gotten a
Sound Blaster Live MP3/5.1 card working under Windows 2000... It took me
over 4 hours to research that one, whereas my 4-year-old --ahem -- no
longer supported -- PCI Diamond MultiMedia Fireport 40 Ultra SCSI card
installed without a hitch...

> >> and they don't behave like the IDE hard drives.
>
> >Well, that's the point, right? ;>)
>
>Not really. IMO a drive is a drive is a drive is a drive.

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but I cannot subscribe to that
point of view -- especially when I want my drive to do something a normal
drive isn't supposed to do.

And don't get me started on IDE 2.1 Orb Drives... Love the storage, *Hate*
the setup... (and XP doesn't support it yet...) SCSI "just plain works..."

> >> 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).
>
>Why? I've never had any need for a SCSI BIOS on my SCSI computers.

And you won't until you need to boot from any drive that's not ID 0 on the
board (like booting from CD, etc...)

> >> In fact, non-PC systems tend to see IDE as a kind of bastard SCSI
> >> instead.
>
> >They may be onto something there . . .

;-)

>For example, the onboard IDE controller in the Amiga 4000 and 1200 appear to
>the system as scsi.device. And NetBSD/amiga only recently switched from "IDE
>on SCSI" to the machine-independent WDC device. =)

And the only way I can get my IDE 16X Plextor CD-RW to work under Linux is
with SCSI emulation - without it I end up with digital frizbees...
Thankfully, SCSI works for me! ;-)

Just my $0.000002 (Canadian - I'm going to Canada today...)
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
Received on Fri Oct 12 2001 - 08:58:01 BST