Most server RAID cards require direct forced-air cooling. You may have killed this one with insufficient cooling...

Yes, I have a HP NetRAID card that complains about overheating at POST if you run the machine with the side panel(s) off.

In the old server case it didn't have any cooling of any sort near or far from it, and i tested it on a board outside of a case 😐

You can see here the old case were it came from, and the card itself when it was still inside of it.

And if you're wondering, there's no fan in the front panel of the case.

Maybe there should be one from the beginning (16 years ago), and when i took the card out it was on it's way out?

If you want to play with scsi, cards like Adaptec 29160 or 39160 should be easy enough to find for little money these days.

You might try pulling the ram from that card and see if it works.

I really wanted to play with these 5 SCSI 40GB (each) hard drives, so my question is..Was i just merely unlucky and i should i get another controller? Or is this something i should stay away from because of high failure rate?
Should i get away from the Mylex brand or are they a good brand? I'm confused about what to do next.

I bought one of these used on eBay back in 2004 because I had good luck with another Mylex DAC960 RAID controller around 2000. My AcceleRIAD 170 had an annoying problem that on every cold boot it would complain about unwritten data in the BBU, but I didn't have a BBU attached. I replaced it with a dual channel PCI-X version (AcceleRAID 352); it worked perfectly and it was faster.

29160/39160 are good calls - cheap and they work on all modern versions of Windows (using the 7 driver), plus all the Unixes.

SCSI can be irritating and expensive to use, but it's quite neat. Looks like you're using Ultra160/320 SCSI there, which is a whole heap easier to use than previous parallel SCSI standards.

I've still got a load of old SCSI hard drives (not worth using, too noisy and low capacity), some CDROM drives (still useful in some cases), and a couple of scanners (also useful).

SCSI is also a lot more cross platform than IDE, my SGI O2 system takes SCA80 SCSI disks for instance, and the old Sparcstation some form of SCSI 2.

It's far too easy to find duff SCSI1/2 cables, coupled with termination issues can make any issue awkward to diagnose. LVD SCSI is more reliable. Modern SAS is basically plug and play, and also supports SATA drives, with some caveats.

SCSI is a lot more complex than IDE/ATAPI, so the number of drivers available less. Memory usage in DOS is likely to be higher.

keenerb wrote:

You might try pulling the ram from that card and see if it works.

I did, also checked the bios battery and it was fine, and couldn't find any short in any capacitor (although it doesn't mean it's fine, but at least it should post something).

I ended up buying the SCSI controller in the first link i gave because it was cheap, but i might take a look later on on those Adaptec 29160 or 39160 that stamasd mentioned.

I hope this controller i'm going to get from ebay last a little more.