🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <e9025800.12.005D6DE8@stud1.tuwien.ac.at>,
Stefan Froehlich <e9025800@stud1.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>In article <3ma9jo$p6g@muffin.pronet.com> cas@muffin.pronet.com (Craig Sanders) writes:
>>From: cas@muffin.pronet.com (Craig Sanders)
>>Subject: ASUS SP3G and/or NCR 53c810 driver?
>>Date: 10 Apr 1995 13:44:56 +1000
>>Summary: how well does it work with Linux?
>
>>However, I've also heard that the NCR 53c810 SCSI controller doesn't
>>work 100% reliably at the moment.  That it is still very much an
>>experimental driver.

There are one or two major bugs I've seen which don't appear to be hardware 
(ie, OPTI chipset; Tseng ET4000W32P; S3928P which all sufferred
from hardware bugs; Connor 1060 firmware bug; things which indicate there 
may be cache corruption problems) or configuration (some PCI mainboards (
ie, Viglen) even have mislabeled jumpers for PCI slot->IRQ mapping) related :

    The NCR driver would crash if a SCSI-II CDROM drive attempted 
    Asynchronous Event Notification.  Linus will incorporate my
    patch for this in 1.2.

    The NCR driver may hang on bootup with a certain Quantum
    Grand Prix 4G drive.

>>Does anyone have either an ASUS SP3G and use the built-in SCSI, or have
>>another board with an NCR 53c810 SCSI controller card installed?
>
>I have it, I use it and I am very happy with it. If I had to buy another PC, I 
>would choose it again.

I've had a NCR chip for > 1 year, and had no problems with it.

>>How well does it work?  Is it reliable?

Provided that you don't need disconnect/reconnect (still unavailable) for 
a tape drive; or simultaenous fast access to multiple spindles, fine.  
Throughput is reasonable - I hooked a Fujitsu 1606 1G (5400 RPM) drive up 
to mine earlier this week, and was averaging 2.75M/sec through the file
system.

>Never lost a bit within three months.
>
>>What sort of conditions does it fail under?
>

If you have bugs in your PCI boards or mainboard, they will
show up with the NCR driver.  Formerly, AEN was also a problem.

If it's going to fail, you won't boot, or will hang when you
get into X or swap heavily for the first time.  If it's fine in
your initial tests, it usually stays fine.

>>Is swapping to SCSI a problem when another SCSI device (e.g. tape drive
>>or cd-rom) is using the SCSI bus a problem?
>
>Don't know. I only have one SCSI disk.

If you rewind/retension a tape and haven't hacked drivers/scsi/st.c,
you will be locked out of your system until the operation completes.

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