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VLB SCSI card worth it?

oblivion

oblivion

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I have a 66mhz 486 i'm trying to eek out all the preformance I can from it and seeing as SCSI VLB cards and SCSI hdd are not to expensive i've been considering them but ive found some conflicting information. should I expect any speed increase with an SCSI drive over my onboard IDE? i'm only running DOS so no windows. I've acually never used SCSI on a PC before so i was intrested. I intend to only use it for the HDD and leave the IDE for my cd rom drive if only that SCSI cd drives seem a little hard to come by.
 
I have a few in use, one with caching and 4MB of RAM, and they rock. Mostly because older IDE drives are slow and with most controllers you are stuck with the 540mb BIOS limit that SCSI cards don't have. Old IDE also hogs CPU time (unless you have a CPU based IDE caching controller which I also love to use). 50 pin SCSI CDROM drives were common on older powermacs (look for the 7500/8500/9500 era machines) and Plextor made some killer speedy ones (highly recomended).

At the end of the day you are still limited with what the VLB BUS can do with respect for speed, but SCSI drives tend to have lower latency so seems to feel quicker and there are some speedy 50 pin SCSI drives made (or you can use a fast 68pin/SCA drive with the correct adapters and termination). Multiple 2GB partitions are easy to make, 2-9GB drives works fine for DOS.
 
I have to agree with Unknown_K. I bought a 486 machine new years ago and had it outfitted with SCSi. It was one hell of a machine. Back then SCSI performance was WAY better than IDE.
I use SCSI in my machines whenever I can.

BTW: I swear by Adaptec products. Absolutely the best SCSI controllers.
 
My older machines are mostly SCSI as well. Old SCSI hard drives are amazingly durable.

Also, most of the early removable drives (Bernoulli, Magneto-Optical, etc) used SCSI. Occasionally one will pop up real cheap because no one can track down the interface.

Performance depends on the drive. High end SCSI drives would be often about 4 times faster than the same time frame IDE; budget SCSI were IDE drives with different connectors and performed the same. However, SCSI was much better at handling many drives.
 
Still have a 486 lurking around here somewhere with an AHA 2840 hooked to a 1GB FH 5.25 drive. It still works and boots OS/2 as well as Windows 95.

Given their limited application, VLB cards should be reasonable in price.
 
I even recommend 16 bit ISA Adaptec cards for 286/386/486 machines without VLB.

As far as reasonable VLB SCSI tends to be $20 and up, caching controllers a bit more (and harder to find).

I think there was even some DOS app that burned ISO to SCSI CDR drives, plus all the SCSI stuff you can stick onto an old machine.
 
well seems like its worth the effort then. I take it its no more complicated then slapping the SCSI card in, hooking up the drive? I do have a 50 pin 4 gig seagate barricuda here but it was loud as hell in my mac. any particular brand of SCSI drives i need to look for? how do you know if a HDD has caching and ram? or were you refering to the controller card?
 
The controller cards that have 4 x 30 pin SIMMs are the caching ones. You need to find the software for the card so that you can use other SCSI stuff like CDROMs etc. You will still need an I/O card (normally the VLB IDE cards have this built in) since at best the VLB SCSI cards might have a floppy controller.
 
Unknown_K said:
The controller cards that have 4 x 30 pin SIMMs are the caching ones. You need to find the software for the card so that you can use other SCSI stuff like CDROMs etc. You will still need an I/O card (normally the VLB IDE cards have this built in) since at best the VLB SCSI cards might have a floppy controller.
Click to expand...

but even without the software it should see a HDD on boot?
 
Stick with the Adaptec 2840 if you're buying one. I use one in a VLB 486 and it's a pretty solid card. I use it for both the boot drive and external storage via 3.5" magneto-optical drive.
 
I'm with glitch--stick with the standard fare--you won't be trying to scrounge drivers. I've used the CSC Fastcache in both PCI and ISA versions and the hangup was always the drivers. I got rid of them eventually out of pure frustration.

The 2840 is about as plain as you can get.
 
Regarding drives, I have had good success with a bunch of Seagate and IBM drives and fair results with just about all the other drives. Okay, I have a MiniScribe drive that gets quite loud but it is still working after 20 years. I would avoid any drive manufactured right towards the end of company's life.

Don't buy an early NEC SCSI CD-ROM, they don't follow the SCSI standard and will only work with a limited subset of SCSI controllers. I was irritated at having to stop using the one I bought after only 5 years because my new SCSI system got confused by it.
 
Very early CD readers don't like any kind of recordable CDR media, so unless you have nothing but original media look for a 4x or newer drive.
 
Was the SCSI card you refered to earlier with the 4mb cache ISA or VLB? I see alot of PCI cards but no earlier type that have the cache but i'm assuming its because thier rare. I already have IDA/floppy/ I/0 stuff built into my motherboard so i thinking that adding an SCSI card with those features won't cause any conflict? any issues with running an IDE cd drive and an SCSI HDD? I'd like try out an SCSI cd drive if it has some advantages like the HDD seems to but they just seem a little hard to come by. In my thrifting I try to look for SCSI drives because I needed one for my Amiga but it seems that for every 20 IDE drives I find I maybe see 1 SCSI cd drive. scavaging older Macs is a good idea though that I didn't think of.
 
VLB

https://picasaweb.google.com/107784270771159898725/VLBCards#5228340610250334674

VERY rare these days.

The cards have jumpers to turn options on/off depending what else is installed. You can use a cheap ISA card for I/O since that doesn't need VLB speeds. Most systems have 2 VLB slots and you generally use one for video and one for a HD of some kind. There are also VLB ethernet cards , have a couple in use didn't know they even existed back in my 486 main machine days.

Back to reality the common VLB SCSI cards are Adaptec with Buslogic and maybe Tekram making some.
 
Unknown_K said:
Very early CD readers don't like any kind of recordable CDR media, so unless you have nothing but original media look for a 4x or newer drive.
Click to expand...

Some drives are better then others in regards to this. My Apple CD-SC+ (Sony CDU-8002) read CD-Rs without a problem. CD-RWs on the other hand are a different story, they require "MultiRead" drives usually made in 1998 or later. The original Sony CDP-101 audio CD player also plays CD-Rs without a problem.

That tidbit about NEC drives not following the SCSI standard is interesting. I always wondered why the one external drive I had was wonky without the correct NEC CD extension on Macs. Early SCSI CD-Rs were weird about drivers too, I remember a friend's Phillips CDD-2000 requiring special drivers to read discs.
 
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