On Sat, 10 Aug 1996, William O Ferry wrote:

> [Stuff about Adaptec SCSI controllers built in to the MB.]

I'd be interested in hearing how well the Adapatec chips are working
for those who actually are using them. Is it production-ready, yet?
How does the speed compare to the NCR?

I just replaced a Buslogic BT-946C (PCI SCSI) with an NCR 53c810
card (the Asus SP-200), and performance is pretty darn similar.
The NCR seems to read slightly faster, and seek very marginally
faster, but these were just quick bonnie benchmarks on three disks
I happened to have lying around (Quantum Atlas, HP SureStore, new
but somewhat screwed Fuji 7200 rpm drive).

The big advantage of the NCR seems to be cost; I can put two or
three NCR controllers in a system for the cost of one Adaptec.

>     Also, given this configuration, what do you think would be the most
> likely bottleneck in the system:
> ASUS PCI-I486/SP3G motherboard, 486DX4/100, 16MB RAM, NCR 53C810 with
> Conner 1.06GB SCSI-II HD (64MB swap), S3 Trio64V+ (2MB PCI) video card.

Without a doubt, RAM. Upgrade to 32MB immediately. (Or better yet,
48MB; you don't want to be buying 8MB SIMMs anyway.) I've got an
almost identical system (excepting a Mach32 2MB VRAM video card
and different drives) and chose to go to 64MB rather than upgrade
to a Pentium. I don't regret this choice at all; I rarely swap,
but it's not unusual for me to be using 50MB of memory.

The performance difference between a 3600 and 5400 RPM drive is
minimal on a 486 NetBSD system, but noticable on a Pentium.

cjs

Curt Sampson    curt@portal.ca		Info at http://www.portal.ca/
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