I have made my rounds through a number of SCSI cards. My latest has been
the Symbios UW 53c875. I picked it up at the computer swap meet held at
Cal Expo and Scottish Rite. It works great. It is fast too. I use it with
an Ultra IBM drive and it rocks. You would think adaptec would be king,
but even according to my buddy who worked at adaptec for 2-1/2 years says
they are far from the best. I have had a few problems with the adaptec
cards. Of course many of them were ones my buddy gave me from his lab,
so sometimes they were prototypes with dated bios chips. Here is the
wierdest thing about Adaptec. The bios seems to act a bit strang and not
appear at bootup. In fact you can turn off the bios, and it is rather
difficult to get the configuration to come back up, so you can go into
it at bootup. He said the symbios is faster, so that is card I am using,
and I highly recommend it. I paid $70 for it.
Oh yes. Not all SCSI controllers are the same. If you want a good one, you
want the bus mastering where the bios on the SCSI can fully control the
drive. Nice thing about SCSI is it can do all the I/O work and disconnect
from the bus. This is great for a multitasking environment. Thing that
sucks is that the drives cost for equivalent space is about twice as
much for SCSI. IDE drives perform fairly well too.
Here are the SCSI controllers I have used:
Apaptec AIC 6360 (Dumb as hell card)
Adaptec 2940 W
Adaptec 2940 (Currently brie.com)
Buslogic (Worked great until I started getting errors. Another lab card.)
Symbios 53c875 UW (rocks)
brian
On Sat, Oct 02, 1999 at 01:09:37AM -0700, Daniel de Young wrote:
> I would really like to join the world of SCSI. This Tekram card seems
> very well featured and is compatible with Linux and FreeBSD.
>
> Any known gripes or decent reasons to spend twice as much on an
> Adaptec. I found this card for $67 at www.compuplus.com.
>
> thx
>
> -Daniel
-- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/
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