VOGONS


First post, by kingcake

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I've been using an ISA 1542CF in my 386. Now I'm upgrading to a Socket 7 board that has PCI slots. What's a good bootable 50-pin card? I looked at the 7000 series but the options were endless.

Reply 3 of 7, by darry

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Then again, why limit yourself to SCSI2SD's throughput when you can use an inexpensive PCI IDE controller with and IDE to SATA converter or even a PCI SATA controller along with any modern SATA SSD ?

Reply 4 of 7, by dionb

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Indeed. SCSI2SD is something to use in systems that have no alternatives. It's wasted in a system that can also use CF, IDE2SD or other (near) native stuff. The extra overhead of SCSI2SD will make it slower than those options anyway. Only reason to go for SCSI in a system like this is to try to re-create some nostalgic build. Nostalgic builds didn't come with SCSI2SD.

Reply 6 of 7, by mpe

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I prefer SCSI for 1990-95 systems. For newer systems PCI IDE is mature enough IMHO. My reasons:

1. Performance of SD2SCSI v6 is excellent and for pre-UDMA disks it is consistently faster than ISA/VL-BUS or early PCI IDE ATA-1/2 implementations. Both in throughput and especially in CPU utilisation (bus master vs PIO when it matters).
2. SCSI BIOS leave behind ATA/BIOS limits/geometry translation related issues and boot issues when moving storage between vintage systems.
3. Large CF cards often don't work well on old IDE implementation. Small CF <512M cards are less and less common these days and tend to be slower and worn-out. With SD2SCSI I can simulate the size and as simulate as many disk I want with a fast and cheap modern SD card.
4. Early PCI controllers are buggy they and don't spare you from loading drivers and tuning to get performance and workarounds for capacity issues.
5. Unlike CF2IDE the SD2SCSI device can be powered from bus which is a nice benefit in many systems.

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