VOGONS


First post, by Ampera

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My Pentium Pro project has hit a snag. The board came DOA, and while I could have used the money from the return to order another board, my modern Z97 board died on that day too, and needed a replacement.

So the project is postponed till I have the resources to get a new board, but I had some ideas of stuff to improve, and the major thing is the storage system.

Originally I was going to throw one of my many IDE drives in, but that's boring and slow. I thought of a SCSI solution, but that's expensive. Unless....

I only have PCI, so I need something PCI or PCI-X which will still work. Most cards have 68-pin connectors on them, but they sell 68 to 80 pin converter boards that allow me to just supply the power through molex. My drives BTW would be two 73GB Ultra320 SCA-80 drives.

I am aware this is an overkill solution for a machine like this, and it's not period accurate, but I thought that it would be a cool addition to the system anyways.

I was also thinking about getting a multi CPU board. I would have to dual boot Windows 95C and NT 4, but I think it would be a cool idea.

Opinions welcome.

Reply 1 of 2, by Errius

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I have done this on a dual boot Windows 98/ME Pentium III machine. I used a 68 pin to SCA adapter to connect a 72 GB drive to the motherboard SCSI controller.

I have another machine which has a more complicated setup because the SCSI card only has a 50 pin connector: 50 pin to 68 pin adapter <-> 68 pin cable <-> 68 pin to SCA-80 adaptor <-> drive. I had to set the drive as terminator to get this to work.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 2 of 2, by lazibayer

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Ampera wrote:
My Pentium Pro project has hit a snag. The board came DOA, and while I could have used the money from the return to order anothe […]
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My Pentium Pro project has hit a snag. The board came DOA, and while I could have used the money from the return to order another board, my modern Z97 board died on that day too, and needed a replacement.

So the project is postponed till I have the resources to get a new board, but I had some ideas of stuff to improve, and the major thing is the storage system.

Originally I was going to throw one of my many IDE drives in, but that's boring and slow. I thought of a SCSI solution, but that's expensive. Unless....

I only have PCI, so I need something PCI or PCI-X which will still work. Most cards have 68-pin connectors on them, but they sell 68 to 80 pin converter boards that allow me to just supply the power through molex. My drives BTW would be two 73GB Ultra320 SCA-80 drives.

I am aware this is an overkill solution for a machine like this, and it's not period accurate, but I thought that it would be a cool addition to the system anyways.

I was also thinking about getting a multi CPU board. I would have to dual boot Windows 95C and NT 4, but I think it would be a cool idea.

Opinions welcome.

It's definitely cool to have SCSI drives in a retro machine. You can get Adaptec 29160N that supports Ultra160 in 32bit PCI format, and that's already faster than what a commoner PCI can offer.