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At the time, in my circle, the Adaptec cards had high geek cred. Adaptec meant you were graduating to SCSI. SCSI meant you could use cool disk drives, and tape
by whartung 3y ago
At the time, in my circle, the Adaptec cards had high geek cred. Adaptec meant you were graduating to SCSI. SCSI meant you could use cool disk drives, and tape drives, and CD-ROM drives, and plotters, and .. and .. it’s SCSI! The world is my oyster! The USB of the early 90s.
Sure everything was more expensive, sure you probably never used it to it’s potential. But SCSI was good Gear. Geeks dig gear, the potential with Gear, the endless possibilities with Gear. And, of course, the posing and preening that goes along with Gear.
“Oh you got a tape backup? Is it . . . SCSI? You know with SCSI the drives can stream simultaneously with less bus contention via DMA while the drive is seeking, improving throughput and utilization on the channels with the daisy chained devices. You know that’s cool, right?”
- bluedino 3y agoI remember saving up my cash to buy an Adaptec 2940 and a 9GB SCSI drive, getting it working and finding it...not noticeably faster than whatever ATA/133 drive I had at the time. Which of course, I could have bought three more of for what I spent.
- threatripper 3y agoBut the 2940 supports up to 7 devices and you could add more drives to improve performance. If you have /, /home, and /usr on a separate drive you get a significant reduction in latency which improves your work efficiency.
- bzzzt 3y agoTried that back in the days, burnt out my power supply. Those 10k SCSI drives used a fair amount of electricity especially while starting up...
- bzzzt 3y agoYou were too late ;), by the time ATA/133 was standard almost all drives supported (Ultra)DMA which meant the host CPU didn't have to 'bit bang' the data anymore. The fastest drives (Seagate Cheetah) did 15K RPM which reduced access time noticeably. Also made a noise like a jet engine though.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoYou took the words out of my mouth. ATA/133 is ~2001 for the drives of 20/40/80Gb. It's a bit too late for a 9Gb drive to show the merits.
- qingcharles 3y agoI had so many Adaptec SCSI controllers in the mid-90s. I think the decent half of the Internet at that time was running off PCs with Adaptecs in them. I was running an EFnet server and what was certainly the largest warez dump site on the Net off those.