Re: genral SCSI questions

["Aaron D. Turner" <aturner pobox com>]

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Charles,

1) Stay away from Adaptec Cards.  90% of problems Linux users have are
with Adaptec 2940 series.  The drivers for the 2940/20 series are getting
better, but not ready for real work in many peoples opinion. (Note, many
people say they've never had a problem too.  It seems to be a crap shoot
with Adaptec's cards.  Also, Adaptec tends to be more succeptable to bus
interferance while NCR and Buslogic are more robust.)

Any NCR or Mylex/Buslogic (non-RAID) based card is an excellent choice.  
Cards based on the NCR 53c8xx chips have great price/performance ratios.  
The most important thing is to get the kernel you want to run, do a 'make
config' and see what cards/chipsets are reported as "supported".

2) SCSI is more useful in servers or other heavy disk/CPU access machines.
If your system falls in that category, then yes SCSI is for you.

3) SCSI's main advantage over UDMA-IDE is that it doesn't task the CPU as
much.  Busmastering SCSI cards have their own processor that does all the
work.  Very useful in true multi-tasking OS's like Linux.  Not so useful
for Windows 95/98.  There are also other advantages (such as burst rates
of 80Mbytes/sec for SCSI-3), but for workstations this is the biggest.

4) Get a quality "active" terminator if you're going to have any external
SCSI devices.  Passive terminators are cheaper, but cause bus errors with
today's high-speed SCSI buses.


- -- 
Aaron Turner           | Either which way, one half dozen or another. 
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