11 Oct
2001
11 Oct
'01
3:51 p.m.
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? 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
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