🚀 go-pugleaf

I am trying to decide which SCSI card to use in a certain setup and
would appreciate any advice you can offer.  Previously I have used
the Adaptec 1522A, but MicroWarehouse informs me that it is now
discontinued.

Whichever card is chosen will be recommended for use in hundreds of
customers' systems and more to come, so I want to recommend something
that is in current production.

We're not driving any hard drives or diskette drives, so speed is not
an important factor.  Nevertheless, the capability to connect to hard
drives in the future has marginal value to us.  We'll be using them
for MO drives, and possibly CD-ROM's and tape drives in the future.

I was therefore considering the Adaptec 1522B adapter, and I have the
following questions:

1) Is the 1522B available "bare"?  They will be used in OS/2 systems
and therefore we have no use for EZ-SCSI and would prefer not to pay
for it.

2) Is the configuration utility where we can set the card's
configuration part of the BIOS, or is it a DOS program?  If it is a
DOS program, this would be a problem for us since these machines do
not have DOS.  Can everything be set in this software that needs a
jumper switch setting on the 1522A?

3) Does it use PIO or DMA?  Is it a bus mastering card?  I remember
reading a while back about the 1542, for example, only being able to
access the first 16 MB of memory.  The result in OS/2 was that
anything above 16 MB was used by the OS as fast swap space but was
otherwise unavailable to the system.

4) Is the 1522A really a discontinued item?

5) In the past we've found the 1522A bare selling for about $75.  Is
this about what we would pay for the 1522B?  If we can save more than
$25 per card (street price < $50), we'd be interested in some of the
other inexpensive offerings (1505, 1510?).

Thanks for any help you can offer on this.

- Keith

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Keith Bennett                             Bennett Business Solutions, Inc.
Silver Spring, MD USA                     OS/2 & DOS Software Development
kbennett@cpcug.org                        (301) 871-7696