27 Oct
2001
27 Oct
'01
9:13 a.m.
I'm sure that ADAPTEC must currently produce SOME products that work. I gave up
on them and their putative warranty some 5-6 years ago, before the current
popularity of WIDE SCSI hardware came about, hence have WIDE hardware from SIIG,
MYLEX, IBM, but not from ADAPTEC.
I don't know what's making these 2940/3940 boards break, but I think there's
some oddity in the way in which they handle the plug-n-play operation. Several
of them aren't found by the system at all, i.e the ROM isn't even seen by the
motherboard, and, in those cases, the hardware doesn't appear under the OS,
either. Others find the ROM, but don't seem to operate the SCSI channel. Still
another (several) work in the old slow motherboards but not in the ones that
operate at a clock of 66 MHz or faster.
By contrast, the very first ADAPTEC cards I got, e.g. AHA1542, AHA1520, AHA1522,
AHA2842, etc, all seem to work just fine.
Dick
----- Original Message -----
From: <gwynp(a)artware.qc.ca>
To: <classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 27, 2001 2:19 PM
Subject: Re: VLB SCSI?
On 27-Oct-2001 Richard Erlacher wrote:
The combination of VLB and PCI apparently is the
only way you can use
fast ethernet together with solid, reliable, proven SCSI. ISA doesn't
support fast ethernet, and from what I've seen, neither does VLB,
though those 2842's are hard to beat. The 2940's surely don't do the
job. I've still got about 75 of them out there that I visit from time
to time, and their owners are, in nearly all cases loath to part with
them. They give little or no trouble, all but half a dozen or so are
running Win95 or 98 with few complaints. That one particular board
seems to have had the formula.
I've been using Adaptec PCI SCSI boards for several years now w/o a
hitch...
# lspci | grep SCSI
00:0d.0 SCSI storage controller: Adaptec AHA-2940U2/W
Anyway, I was digging around for a VGA card that this Micron motherboard
won't reject and found the old ISA/VLB/PCI motherboard. It was a PCI54PV.
Finding it brings back all kinds of memories, mostly of the pain of using
it. It taught me to never allow a computer store choose your motherboard.
-Philip