Yes, 1998 would be Ultra-2, usually low-voltage differential, so AHA-2940U2W fits very well.

Any LVD drive should be fine, eg. Seagate drives with "LW" in the name.
As for optical drives - CD recorders were very popular in SCSI variants.
And then there was plenty of special suff with SCSI interface: tape streamers, ZIP and LS superfloppies, magneto-optical, scanners...

For LVD SCSI, you need an LVD cable, with 68-pin connectors, and the terminator is always on the cable, as LVD drives lack terminators.

The desirable SCSI interface of the time was Ultra2 Wide SCSI, which delivered 80MB/sec with a 16-bit pipeline. The 2940 was a venerable line of PCI SCSI host adapters driving everything from scanners to enterprise-class hard drives. At the time I had an ASUS P2B-LS with an integrated 3890 single-chip host adapter (the same chips as the 2940U2W).

You'll use a 68-pin SCSI cable, which should have a built-in terminator at the end. I would not bother with a SCSI optical drive. For drives, you should be able to find plenty of 9.1 or 18.2 GB Ultra2 drives on eBay for cheap, depending on your location. They were mostly popular in server and enterprise deployments so look for Compaq and HP branded OEM drives.

Think I was still running my Tekram DC390F. SCSI was a money sink back then!

In early 2000 my main desktop was a dual Celeron-533 on a P2L97-DS, a couple of older 9GB 7500RPM drives (Cheetahs I think), and a Pioneer SCSI drive. As the motherboard and storage were bought second hand at the time, it would have been in use by the previous owner a year or two before that, so a 1998 setup. The CPUs were new for 2000 though, so it would have been running PII-350s in '98.

I had 2940U2W in 1999. Either that or a 2940UW.

since everyone wants good quiet and reliable scsi drives fluid dynamic bearing (FDB) are the best look for drives that have those.

Thanks for all the nice replies everyone 😀

I just realised that I have a box of SCSI drives somewhere in the garage salvaged from some servers, I will check those to see if any are suitable

If I dont have anything reasonable will have to get hold of a drive, but a nice 9.1GB OEM drive (as per JudgeMonroe's reply) should be affordable 😀

SBB wrote:

Thanks for all the nice replies everyone 😀

I just realised that I have a box of SCSI drives somewhere in the garage salvaged from some servers, I will check those to see if any are suitable

If I dont have anything reasonable will have to get hold of a drive, but a nice 9.1GB OEM drive (as per JudgeMonroe's reply) should be affordable 😀

I suppose one thing to watch out for with those OEM drives is a lot of them are in hot-swap caddies and may have SCA-80 connectors on them (sometimes the SCA board is part of the caddy and the drive has "normal" connectors). I know more than one such drive was, uh, decommissioned from a server at my workplace and found its way to my home computer. You can always take them out of the caddies and should be able to find appropriate adapter boards.

Wow, I still have to much. From my first 486 I had a DTC EISA setup. '98 was maybe my old Abit IT5H running buslogic controllers. It had 3 cards, one modded by buslogic with an odd address. 2 952's and a 932. I need to ebay the whole collection, Nakamichi's, Pioneers, plextors, 5 disk cage, removable sleds, 80pin backplanes, IBM 9,18,36 GB disk...$1/lbs. Ya, someone could have some fun.