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From: michaelv@iastate.edu (Michael L. VanLoon)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: What SCSI card for 32meg P560?
Date: 19 Mar 94 07:20:57 GMT
Organization: Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa
Lines: 45
Message-ID: <michaelv.764061657@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu>
References: <MARK.878.2D88ABD9@novell.business.uwo.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ponderous.cc.iastate.edu
In <MARK.878.2D88ABD9@novell.business.uwo.ca> MARK@novell.business.uwo.ca (Mark_Bramwell) writes:
>Since everyone thinks my problem with a P5-60 and 32megs of ram is the scsi
>board -> adaptec 1540.
>What scsi boards are supported now with 32megs of ram?
The ISA bus does not support more than 16meg of RAM -- this is your
problem. You need a 32-bit card; EISA, PCI, or VLB will do the trick.
Go with EISA or PCI for performance before VLB. VLB is cheaper, but
doesn't offer as good a bus arbitration scheme. I don't know if
anyone has tried a PCI bus card on the free BSD's yet. I can't
guarantee it'll work out of the box.
I use a BusLogic card and am totally sold on the product quality and
the responsiveness of the company (unlike the horror stories of
Adaptec users/programmers).
The BusLogic line for your needs stacks up like this:
bt742a EISA SCSI-1 (5MB/s)
bt747s EISA FAST SCSI-2 (10MB/s)
bt757s EISA FAST+WIDE SCSI-2 (20MB/s)
bt445s VLB FAST SCSI-2 (10MB/s)
bt946c PCI FAST SCSI-2 (10MB/s)
The best thing about the BusLogic cards is that they're all identical
at the firmware interface, so they all work with the same driver,
regardless of bus design. Theoretically, this means the PCI bus card
should work. Unfortuantely, I don't know enough about the PCI bus to
verify this, and nobody yet has tried it to my knowledge.
I run a bt747s on my EISA bus machine with NetBSD-current and it works
wonderfully. You may have problems using a new BusLogic card with the
older SCSI driver in NetBSD-0.9 (but this is fixed in NetBSD-current).
FreeBSD also has this problem fixed. Good luck.
--Michael
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Michael L. VanLoon Iowa State University Computation Center
michaelv@iastate.edu Project Vincent Systems Staff
Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free Un*x for PC/Mac/Amiga/etc.
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