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scsi/ethernet combo card

haightc

Experienced Member
Joined
Jan 13, 2016
Messages
51
Location
SeaTac, WA
Does a combo scsi ethernet isa card exist? My 486 only has 3 slots so I am wondering how I might be able to free up a slot.
 
The motherboard has ide, floppy, sound card, modem, serial, parallel and vga built in.
There are only 3 slots in the machine which a 16 bit ISA.
In the slots are 3com etherlink III, CEE GPIB interface and a adapter SCSI card. I have scsi / ethernet card for my Sun systems but those are sbus and PCI respectively. If such a card existed for ISA that would free up a slot for further expansion.
 
Instead of beating your head against the wall why don't you use an IDE drive? Or is that just too simple? :) :) :)

What do you want to add that doesn't fit now?
 
You mean a riser card like these?

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Actually they PC uses a propitiatory 3 slot riser.

Using IDE only isn't really an option for a number reasons.
1) The BIOS only supports hard drives connected to the IDE port
2) There is only one IDE header supporting a max of two hard drives.
3) I use the SCSI card for attaching my SyJet drive and CD-ROM.

SCSI is also significantly faster that IDE
 
Putting a round peg into a square hole is always more problems than it's worth.

A 'real' 486 (or anything) would obviously solve all your problems.
:smile: :smile: :smile:
 
My only thought here, is at the sacrifice of some performance, you could remove the ethernet card and move to using something like a Xircom PE3 - a parallel port based device.
 
It's a NEC ready 433

My SyJet drive came with one of the shuttle parallel to SCSI adapters. These are SUPER slow compared to real SCSI, writing in image 480mb image take 1-2 days over parallel SCSI adapter verses about 15-20 minutes via SCSI.
I haven't considered parallel to ethernet, I'll look into this the maybe the performance hit would be as bad.
About the max I can download something right now is 14kbps atleast under NT, via DOS maybe faster. Primarily I plan to use as this as a DOS machine, just have NT installed to see if I can get a BIOS update.
 
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