*BSD News Article 58590


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Future Domain SCSI -- Help!
Date: 31 Dec 1995 10:25:34 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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References: <4br735$rtq@rbdc.rbdc.com> <4btq8h$555@uriah.heep.sax.de> <4c43ld$ceq@rbdc.rbdc.com>
Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch)
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mcknight@rbdc.rbdc.com (Michael McKnight) writes:
> Thanks to all who replied.  You all were common in your answeres...
> a driver needs to be written.  I can't be any help here -- I'm
> not a programmer by any stretch of the immagination.

(Somebody volunteered, btw. :)

> If I add another IDE drive on an EIDE system (Compaq Presario 9546)
> will FreeBSD find it?  Even if there is already a drive and a CDROM
> (I heard that EIDE can support 4 devices).

IDE could support 2 drives per controller long ago plus at least one
secondary controller, even ESDI.  It's only a question that you need
additional controllers with additional IO addresses and IRQ's.  This
wasn't very common until recently, but FreeBSD has already supported
this at least for 1.5 years now.

(Actually, i've once got a hacked version of 386BSD 0.1 that ran with
a primary IDE and secondary WD1007V ESDI controller.  Since it's been
386BSD, it must have been somewhere in summer 1993 or so. :)

For EIDE, make sure that your drive doesn't use some trickery like a
disk manager.  FreeBSD can address the entire drive anyway, so there's
no need for it.

> If no, then which SCSI card seems to work best?  Not too expensive
> though, but no cheapie either.

For ISA, get one of the AHA154X adaptors.  You should be able to get a
used one fairly cheap (or even at no cost).  Be careful with some very
old AHA-154X*A* parts, they had a bug with scatter-gather operation
(though mine does work fine).

For PCI, you'd get the best bang-for-buck ratio with an NCR 52C810
controller.  They are fairly cheap, so they would even justify for
some other SCSI equipment in favour of e.g. a crappy Floppy Tape.
(IMO).

The rule of thumb is that you'll have a hard time to find crappy SCSI
hardware, while you'll also have a hard time to find non-crappy
non-SCSI hardware. :-)  (That's why we love SCSI, not just that we
are ignorant, or that we've got a Rich Uncle in America. :)

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)