In message <199605200154.SAA13200@toccata.fugue.com>, Ted Lemon writes:
>That's right.   You don't want EDO ram if you care about reliability -
>it buys you about a 5% speed boost but eliminates the possibility of
>error checking.   Really bad design, IMHO - there's nothing about EDO
>per se that prohibits ECC - they just chose not to make it possible.

I've heard to expect EDO+parity RAM by the end of the summer, but that's
still just a guess.  EDO is pretty cool
(see http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vax/ram.html) -- but I hear it has
only marginal benefit if you're running a reasonable cache.

>My Adaptec controller, which is a 2940, has a tendency to lock my
>system up during periods of intense I/O.   For example, the nightly
>file system checks.   I would expect the 2940W to behave the same way
>- I believe the chipset is identical.

I really like my ASUS NCR, it was US$69, specs as well as the non-wide
adaptec (even a little better in some cases), and has never given me
problems, except once at the end of a QIC tape during a dump.

If you get an adaptec card, seriously consider the ASUS card which is
nearly $100 cheaper, uses the 2940 chipset, and has a soundblaster to boot
(I think).  Don't worry, AFAIK the soundblaster is completely independent
of the SCSI electronics.  It fits in the mediabus slot so the motherboard
can deliver ISA interrupts to the card (that's what the extra connector
is for).  Kludgey, but it makes things hardware compatible.