Future Domain SCSI controller for A
neese at cpe.UUCP
neese at cpe.UUCP
Tue Oct 11 02:45:00 AEST 1988
>for our '286 machines. A local dealer has recommended the
>Future Domain SCSI controller and claims this works with
>Xenix/Unix and that someone has this setup using Microport.
> Has anyone had any experience with this board ?
The FD board is a nice board, but it is a dumb board and requires the COPU
to do everything (i.e. high overhead).
> Does this imply a special version of Xenix ?
I think, in this case, it is a generic SCO product that you can run this with.
> Is this board related in anyway to the Tandy SCSI board ?
> (I though the Tandy board was micro channel only)
No, the Tandy board is the Adaptec SCSI AHA-1540 board. Very intelligent.
It is an AT board, the MC board is not shipping yet.
> Is there a better Xenix/SCSI combination ?
Without sounding like a commercial, I will elaborate on the features of the
Tandy board. The board has a programmable high speed DMA (up to 10MBytes/sec),
command queuing (up to 255 commands), transparent SCSI bus arbitration,
programmable bus on/off times, INT13 compatible BIOS, programmable mailbox
architecture, automatic request sense information for errors, async/sync
support transparently, and some other features that require hard drive vendors
to implement.
> Any clues or experiences would be appreciated. I'd love to
>use SCSI as my main disk interface, but am I going to have to
>run Microport to do this ?
Tandy sells a version of SCO (2.2.4) which has support for the AHA-1540
(Tandy 25-4161) built in. You can boot from the SCSI drive or use it as
a secondary and boot from an ST-506 drive. 2.2.4 and 2.2.3 are virtually
the same except for the SCSI support in 2.2.4. The SCSI driver for 2.2.4
is a true multi-threaded driver. The driver also supports several SCSI tape
drives. Neal Nelson has benchmarked a Tandy 4000 (16Mhz 386) with a SCSI
80MB and 170MB. Call them for the results.
We have been using the SCSI stuff here for about 6 months and haven't had a
problem. One of the systems is configured with a 80MB, 344MB and 150MB tape.
Another system is configured with a 40MB and 80MB drives. The systems
really run quite well (translate to: scream). One system is a news/note
gateway and the other is a 16 user system. Both see an extreme amount of
disk I/O and we haven't had any trouble with either. Of course in all
fairness, we are an engineering site with several very experienced Xenix
people on board, but I don't see why anyone would have problems with the
implementation.
Roy Neese
Tandy Computer Product Engineering
UUCP@ {killer, ninja}!cpe!neese
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