Adaptec 29160 question
- From: Mike Luther <mike.luther@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 18:40:08 +0000
I have two new complete kit boxes for the Adaptec 29160 SCSI cards. As brand new items, I'm pretty positive they would have the 'latest' BIOS releases on the new PCI SCSI cards in them.
Long ago I got the IBM Testcase release of the 7800FAM updates for the Adaptec SCSI drivers that were a part of the large file size and what were originally shared IRQ and other issues with OS/2 that I think started originally with my findings for IBM/Adaptec on OS/2 that the 3940 twin hardware card had these errors in OS/2 where more than one IRQ per PCI slot was actually in use.
Anyway, without thinking about things, I moved one 2940U2W system to the 29160 system using the IBM 7800FAM updates that are a part of all my normal Adaptec SCSI box driver files. There is only ONE internal Seagate latest 320 rate SCSI hard drive in this system, properly terminated with the 160 rate SCSI cable that comes with the Adaptec 29160 kit in this box. I do not contemplate any type of multiple drive operation with this PCI card, but do expect to add a Seagate DAT3 tape backup unit to it at some point. Haven't tested this yet. These work fine with the 2940U2W systems here.
To date, I've seen no 'trouble' with this. But in just checking through the back OS/2 Newsgroup postings and the OS/2 .ru hardware website reports, I noticed that although one poster noted good results, there have been two reports of bad issues with this 29160 level card.
It is said that there have been both no better than half 'standard' rate throughput on these cards as well as total failure if more than four SCSI devices are involved with them! That, although the fuss was known with Adaptec, the Adaptec folks never 'fixed' the device driver for the 29160 systems. One report says 'not' so .. although that time frame Device Driver for the AICU160.ADD driver that is in the IBM special release 7800FAM package has an older date and is the same byte size as the older AICU160.ADD driver, it is actually different and 'fixed'. I can confirm from looking at things here that there is, in fact, a two byte content difference in the content of the driver in the 7800FAM IBM distributed package and the earlier version.
Does anyone here have any later information on the real reliability and performance for the 29160 'latest' product? At the expense of Adaptec stuff I'd really rather not throw this away. I'm still using MCP2 level stuff and not at this point involved with the later ACPI stuff, I think, at this point on any of the older level Intel 915/945 motherboard stuff with Intel CPU sets.
I have also gotten the much later released OS/2 Distribution .ZIP file for the AICU320.ADD package which has a file size and date of 188840 bytes at the 09-20-04 date.
Should I bite this horrible cost bullet and scrap these 29160 cards, going ahead to the 320 level card stuff? Does anyone here have any actual information to give me on the 320 level card performance, BIOS issues, and so on for MCP2 latest level systems or onward toward eCs 2.# whenever it gets released? If I were to do this, what exact package from Adaptec should I seek?
Advice plesae?
--
--> Sleep well; OS2's still awake! ;)
Mike Luther
.
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