🚀 go-pugleaf

I am trying to decide whether to upgrade the memory on my system from 24mb's
to 32 or to upgrade from a SCSI 2 card and HD to SCSI 3 setup and would
appreciate any concrete information anyone can provide on which is the better
option.

I use OS2 on a 120mhz Pentium system (ASUS P55TP4XE board) with a 4MB Video
card and RAM as above and am looking to speed up disk I/O if I can. The SCSI
card I am considering is the adaptec AHA-2940 UW (or perhaps the AHA-2940W)
but I do not want to get this card and a new wide (or UW) SCSI drive and find
that the performance improvement is negligible. 

In particular, being largely ignorant of these things, I do not know whether
the faster transfer rates which SCSI 3 or U-SCSI offers are dependant upon the
drivers or only the firmware (and, if the drivers, whether the generic adaptec
driver provided with warp will support these faster transfer rates). I
currently have a Fujitsu 1.02 GB SCSI 2 drive with 512k cache and use an NCR
SCSI card (810 chipset) and, according to the "diskio" utility available on
Hobbes, the cache/bus transfer rate with this setup is 5063 k/sec. Since I
believe that transfer rates of up to 10mb/sec are supposed to be possible with
SCSI 2 and I clearly do not get this kind of rate with my current setup, I
thought I would check that purchasing the adaptec card would actually bring me
some benefit. I will settle for less that the 20mb/sec which fast wide SCSI is
supposed to support, but I do want to be sure that there will be an
appreciable improvement over my current setup to justify the cost here.

So, do the warp adaptec drivers support this card and the features it offers
and will I actually see something approaching the kind of transfer rates it
makes possible or am I wasting my money here (and would be better with the
memory). Also, I recall seeing a reference somewhere to a problem with some
ASUS boards and Adaptec SCSI cards, is there such a problem and is the board I
am using (P55TP4XE) amongst those affected? More generally, what kind of
features should I look for in a new HD? Is it important to go for one with a
greater onboard cache if I am using OS2? 

Thanks in advance for any help,

Donald Wilson.