[1695] in linux-scsi channel archive
RE: SCSI card : Asus SC200 or Tekram DC 390 ?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Gary I. Kahn)
Wed Apr 9 21:05:05 1997
In-Reply-To: <v01510100af70322737ed@[195.25.51.10]>
Date: Tue, 08 Apr 1997 21:29:46 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Gary I. Kahn" <gkahn@erols.com>
To: <stephane@e2c.com (Stephane Legrand)>
Cc: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
Stephane--
>The major disadvantage of the Asus is that it doesn't have the SCSI BIOS.
>Is it really important (i don't need to boot on the scsi disk) ? And i
read
>that to use this card the PC motherboard must have support for NCR ? Is
>that true ? And how to know if the motherboard support it ?
I think that the BIOS is required by the SCSI driver for linux. I base my
feeling on a comment in the source code for the driver in
/usr/src/linux/drivers/scsi.
To determine whether my motherboard's BIOS supports the Symbios chips, I
used the command
cat /dev/mem > tempfile
to dump an image of all of memory. I needed to "su" first. Then, I used
less -i tempfile
and scanned for "SDMS" and "Symbios", figuring that one of them would show
up if the Symbios SDMS drivers were included in my BIOS. Neither did. I
don't know if this method would actually reveal the Symbios support, but I
hoped a copyright notice would be show up. Most of the people reporting
that they're using the Asus cards seem to also be using the Asus
motherboards, which (of course) have the BIOS support.
If your motherboard has a flash BIOS, it may be possible to replace your
current BIOS with a shareware BIOS called "MR BIOS" or something like
that. The documentation for that BIOS listed the motherboards with which
it was compatible, and it gave information about how to add the Symbios
extension. I'm sorry, but I no longer have the WWW address of the sellers
of MR BIOS. I didn't try this method, since buying the shareware BIOS
negates the savings of buying the ASUS card. Also, there was risk
involved since the new BIOS and the card, both bought by mail from
separate sources, might not work together.
>
>For the Tekram, it seems that it is based on an AMD chip which is less
>performant and less supported (for driver) than the NCR chip. Again, is
>that true ?
I bought the Tekram DC390 after trying out a friend's Adaptec 2920. The
DC390 performed marginally faster than the 2920 (in my machine with my
harddisk).
>
>In fact, i would rather to buy the Tekram because they have done a driver
>for Linux and FreeBSD and i think it's very nice :-)
The availability of a linux driver, with source code that I was able to
look at before the purchase, decided me in favor of the Tekram card. I
compared the list of supported features in the available "dc390.h" file
with the other .h files in the linux source code. In particular, I looked
at the .h files for the NCR chips, comparing the #defined DC390_T settings
with similar settings for other chips. The DC390 seemed competitive to me.
I'm very happy with my DC-390 card. I'm using it with a Quantum Lightning
730MB harddisk and a Toray Phasewriter Dual PD/CDROM drive. Performance
is what I expected, and the included setup BIOS with the card is very nice.
Please feel free to ask any specific questions that you have about the
card. I'm sorry I couldn't be more helpful about whether an NCR-based
card will work for you.
By the way, you might also want to consider the NCR53C825 card, which has
a BIOS and is only a little higher in price than the Tekram DC-390. I was
guided by price, and by Tekram's direct support of linux, and by the
availability of information about the DC-390 card. The NCR53C825 card
that I had in mind was an OEM card, and the specs were subject to frequent
change. The retailer wasn't very interested in getting specific about the
card's characteristics.
Gary Kahn gkahn@erols.com
