Last week in a moment of crazed lust/madness i decided to give SCSI a try as there was one going cheap on the forums. I've got a Quantum Atlas 10K3 10,000rpm 36GB drive. Then i bought an Adaptec SCSI controller off ebay. This is the item. On the card it says 'Adaptec SCSI card 19160/29160N' i'm not sure if they use the same PCB or whatever but it was recognised as a 19160, but it works exactly the same if i use 29160N drivers and there is no performance difference between the two or instability. Anyway, the product comparison between the two shows very little difference, so i don't think thats the issue. Basically, i benched it with HDTach and this is what i'm getting. Random access and read are fine and whats expect, but the burst speed just seems way too slow and i have no idea whats causing it. The controller ID is 7 and the drives ID is 6. I think i've set up the cable right, iit goes Controller ==> Drive ==> Terminator and then two spare connectors on the end. Narrow mode isn't enabled on the drive. The only thing that it's sharing the PCI-Bus with is my wireless network card which shouldn't really be having an affect. the controller is in the slot closest to the agp slot so is theoretically in the fastest place. Any ideas on what's slowing it down? It isn't my windows drive yet but will be soon. I understand that windows is mainly smaller files so a low burst speed shouldn't affect performance that much. Is it simply the drive/card that i've bought arnt that fast? Any ideas would be appreciated. Just a quick question. When installing windowsxp to a scsi drive do i just need the controller drivers on a floppy disk and press F6 when it asks?
Yeh the drive is LVD and so is the card but how do i tell if the cable is and what difference would it make? And there doesn't seem to be any jumper config on the drive that allows you to enable/disable LVD After reading this datasheet for the drive it appears i'm being limited to ultra scsi speeds when i should be at ultra160 speeds. Seeing as though both the drive and card are ultra160 does that mean the cable is limiting it? I just got a 68pin scsi cable of ebay, there was no mention of speed or anything.
Yes looks like you're being limited to Ultra speeds, 40Mb/s. Ive not used LVD kit before, so Im not sure if theres any cable differences. I do know that the terminator must by LVD compatible, otherwise the bus will fall back to SE, which looks like whats happening. I would say use the drives terminator but the lack of a jumper there to enable it suggests there isnt one built in? btw I think the diffsens jumper is to select SE or LVD mode, i think drives autodetect (not sure) but if the terminator is good for LVD try and find out what that should be set to. If I didnt have to run off to a lecture id have a better look through the Maxtor site for it
cheers i'll give that a try see if it helps [edit] well i swapped the jumper and it made no difference either way. soo ho hum...
"enable narrow" jumper is most likely shorted whip that off and the drive should sync up at 160 instead of 40
If it isn't an U160 cable (usually indicated by U160 or SCSI3) the cards boot screen will usually show the drive syncing up at 40.. If I recall the only difference between the 19160 and the 29160 is the 19160 is a 32bit card, and the 29160 is the 64bit version. I've had very similar results in my scsi expermenting.. I have the LSI version of your controller, almost identical and I tried it using a 9gb u160 10krpm drive.. However my writes were up to par, it was my reads that were slow.. See Never did find a solution.. Edit: Shouldn't need the F6 for drivers with XP and that card, they come with XP.. -scoob8000 -scoob8000
I just ran it with absolutely no jumpers on what so ever and got the same result. whats going on aarrgghhh
go into the scsi card bios (ctrl A at bios scan) and make sure that theyre all set to sync at 160 if theres nothing there, then its probably a duff cable
Yeh it must be the cable, i had a play in BIOS and everything is set to 160. then i actually paid attention when the controller card BIOS posted and it said that the drive had sync'd at 40mb/s so must not be a 160 cable, which is annoying but ho hum.
olv, Did you ever get to find the solution to this problem. I stumbled on this site because I have exactly the same problem (okay Atlas 10K2 U160 18gb, on a Tyan Tiger i7505 mobo), tried several cables (even though the one that I always use normally is U160) and still got the same result of 40Mb instead of 160Mb in the 'Sync' column of the SCSI Bios startup screen. My kit was bought new, and to be honest I too never paid that much attention to the SCSI Bios start up until recently...... Only thing I can think of is incompatibility with my mobo. Cheers, Jez
no sorry, i ditched this setup a few years ago and i never did bother buying another cable to see if that sorted it.
