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From: bob@luke.pmr.com (Bob Willcox)
Subject: Re: SCSI choice: ASUS SC200 or Adaptec
Sender: bob@obiwan.pmr.com (Bob Willcox)
Organization: Bob's Place, Austin TX
Message-ID: <Do6vr0.G54@obiwan.pmr.com>
References: <4i4fbn$big@bmerhc5e.bnr.ca>
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: luke.pmr.com
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 1996 04:42:36 GMT
Lines: 72
In article <4i4fbn$big@bmerhc5e.bnr.ca>,
Andrew Atrens <atrens@bmerh278.bnr.ca> wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I'm configuring a system and am trying to make a speed vs.
>price decision with regards to the SCSI controller I buy.
I have several systems here with NCR and Adaptec adapters in
them, some with both.
>So my question is:
>
>* How does the ASUS SC200 (NCR) SCSI controller perform in
> comparison with the Adaptec 2940 ??
The benchmarks I have run show them to be about the same. I can
see (feel?) no real difference between them.
>* The Adaptec ( in my neck of the woods, at least ) costs
> times as much as the ASUS. Is it worth the extra money ???
I would say not if you have the NCR bios on your motherboard. The
Adaptec bios does support more disks on DOS, but this shouldn't
matter if all you run is FreeBSD. :-)
>* Are there any driver dependencies?, ie, is FreeBSD's
> Adaptec driver better than its NCR driver, or are drivers
> even a factor?
Again, I find the two drivers perform about equally. The NCR driver
does handle my Exabyte EB-8200 8mm drives a bit better (the Adaptec
complains about the drive being busy during things like rewind).
>My System Configuration:
>
> P5-133
> P/I P55TP4XE mb.
> 16MB, w. 256 pipeline cache
> ( Disks still to be determined, probably 5400rpm 1GB seagates )
The system that I am typing this on is similar. I have 2 SC200
adapters on it configured thusly:
P5-166
No-name Tiawan MB with Triton chipset and 256kb pipeline cache
64mb RAM
Adapter 1: 2 Seagate 2gb Hawks and 2 Hitachi 1gb drives
Adapter 2: 1 Exabyte EB-8200 tape drive, 1 Wangtek 5525ES tape drive,
1 Toshiba 3701 CDROM drive.
>My System Usage:
>
> Single user, X, software development, lots of long compiles, etc.
My systems here all get pretty heavy usage. One is the file server &
news server for our little company, the others tend to do lots of
kernel builds and ``make world''s.
>Any insights would be greatly appreciated!
Bottom line, in my opinion, both adapters work well under FreeBSD.
The Adaptec seem to be more tolerant of long SCSI bus lengths and
(sometimes) faulty termination. Also, I have had better luck with
some disks on the Adaptecs (my Toshiba MK438FB [I think] won't work
at all on the NCR adapters) and some tape drives on the NCRs (the
Exabyte 8200 drives mentioned above).
--
Bob Willcox
bob@luke.pmr.com
Austin, TX