A friend of mine gave me a SCSI controller card a while ago, and I'm
finally starting to think about buying a really fast SCSI HDD so I can
boot up, and load stuff as quickly as possible without RAID. I was
thinking about buying a SCSI hardware RAID card, but it seems like PCI
(32bit) would be a somewhat limiting factor. And I just bought a $400
nVidia 6800GT AGP video card, and I don't want to toss it, and I have
yet to see a motherboard with both AGP and PCI-X
That, and I am
looking at buying an AMD64 motherboard and CPU eventually, so if any
Intel motherboard have both AGP and PCI-X, that won't help me.
OK, so back on topic. The card I have lying around is an Adaptec
AHA-2940U2W. The specifications for it are he
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/sup...ey=AHA-2940U2W
I am thinking about buying this nice 15,000RPM "SCSI Ultra 320 68 Pin"
drive:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...116-140&depa=1
I don't know a whole lot about SCSI levels, as I have never used SCSI
before. I do know the basics like IDs and terminators, but I don't the
levels of compatability. So according to the spec's of my card, it
supports SCSI 1, 2, 3, and UltraSCSI. Can anyone enlighten me as to
weather UltraSCSI is equal to, or backwards compatable with "Ultra
320"? Will I see any performance hits...the spec's for my card also
say that the maximum data transfer rate is 80MBps. Are the newer 15k
RPM drives anywhere close to 80MBps??
I see on the specification page for my card that "Extended translation
scheme supports up to eight (8) Gbytes per disk" ... hum that does not
sound good. Does that mean the card cannot support bigger HDDs, like
the 36.7GB one I linked to easlier? The latest BIOS update for my card
is from June 8th 2000
... doesn't sound very encouraging.
If I need a new SCSI controller card, or if you reccomend that I
should get a new one, can you give some tips on a good, fairly cheap
PCI (32bit) SCSI card. Linux compatability is a must, but if you don't
about its Linux compatability, thats OK, I can do the research
Thanks,
--Farrell F.