I'm having SCSI issues here at my place... I'm currently running an Adaptec 29160N and I've run out of space inside my computer case and I'm running out of IDs to put things...
I've got 3 hard drives right now (Ultra 160), a UltraWide PLEXTOR CDRom, and 4 PLEXTOR Plexwriter 12/4/32 for short run duplicating.
I'd like to have a card that can handle Ultra 160 and SCSI2 on two channels and have internal and external connectors. The Adaptec 39160 has 68 pin outside and it has 1-50 and 1-68 inside. I have burners outside and I'm adding an exabyte drive for backup/DDP which is SCSI-2. I'm also adding a hot-swap kingston drive carrier outside to plug discs into directly.
And oh yeah, this needs to be on one card because I've run out of slots in my case (2 sound cards, network, graphics, 2 scsi cards right now... and I'm going to get a TC powercore eventually)
Any ideas?
--Ben
Comments
I use the 39160, and will strongly suggest that in your situatio
I use the 39160, and will strongly suggest that in your situation to consider [[url=http://[/URL]="http://www.attotech…"]ATTO Tech's PCI UL3D[/]="http://www.attotech…"]ATTO Tech's PCI UL3D[/] controller.
The 39160 will require 2 IRQ's, and its not the most flexible beast out there. Your 160 LVD devices must be on the "B" channel and slower devices on the "A" channel to keep the card from slowing all devices. ATTO has none of these issues as I recall. ATTO is more expensive, but it is much more forgiving, especially true in the single channel version where you can have 15 devices and a mix of both Legacy and LVD and they all work at their max speeds.
The 39160 also throws some junk onto the bus and if you have other sensitive devices, Like a modem in there, you probably won't be able to use it internally, it can also interfear with a MOTU PCI-324 card (although it will work with some careful slot choice), if you are a user or contemplating it?
In some cases, it will not allow a direct boot to a CD-ROM either, such as with YAMAHA Drives.
If you get a 39160, I'd make sure to keep your Ultra160 hard dri
If you get a 39160, I'd make sure to keep your Ultra160 hard drives on one channel by themselves to keep the max bandwidth thing happening on that channel, put all the other slower devices (cd burners, tape drives, etc) on the other channel... however if you need to split a scsi channel into a mixture of wide and narrow, single-ended and differential devices, then you can do that with some neat interface boxes from http://www.paralan.com which are basically hardware scsi protocol converters. They will let you mix-n-match various flavors of scsi devices on a single scsi chain/channel without slowing them all down to the rate of the slowest device, plus get around voltage, wide/narrow and S.E./differential incompatibilities. I use one of their boxes to connect an LVD/SE DLT tape unit to one of my old IBM RS6000 servers which only has HVD wide scsi interface cards and it works beautifully. The only bad news is that these boxes are about $600 each so plan your "FrankenSCSI" chain carefully to minimize how many of these you'd have to buy.
They make them in both external boxes and internal cards which fit inside an unused 5.25" drive bay.
P.S., I'd even consider getting an external SCSI disk drive cabinet for the hard drives so that they'd have their own power supply and cooling fans. An external drive cabinet has that "geek factor" coolness to it, plus might even make it easier to move the drives further away from the DAW environment to help isolate all the noise they make. That's one of the other benefits of SCSI over IDE, there's no reason why your hard drives have to be physically located within a few inches of the motherboard :)