5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Excellent SCSI Controller Card
Date of Review: Jan 14, 2004
The Bottom Line: A great buy for entry level SCSI. Excellent support and drivers. More expensive than SATA.
Introduction
I was in need of a scsi controller card that could work with my older Ultra Wide drives, standard SCSI zip and burner etc. I purchased this controller then I upgraded my hard drive to a U160 drive.
Compatibility
The controller works with Iomega ZIP SCSI, Yamaha CRW4416S cd-rw, and the various hard drives I've tested.
Installation is a breeze in Win2k etc. NT4 requires you to have the driver available when you're installing.
The card is flash upgradable. There really is not much difference between performance before or after flashing. The only difference I saw after upgrading my controller's bios was in the text displayed on bootup.
SCSI Chains
Apparently the external connector is for the U160 chain... I did not want this as I have an external scsi box full of UW drives and hooking them up to the U160 chain would slow things down for my U160 hard drive. Thus, I took some scsi cables/connectors and made another external connector that connected the slower internal UW chain to my external scsi box.
SCSI Setup requires you to terminate your scsi chains. This is easy if you know what you're doing. Beginners should seek advice to make sure they have proper termination. Example 50pin plus UW on same chain with controller in middle... Requires term high bits but not low bits.
Interface
The PCI64 interface gives this controller a slight boost over other controllers. It is supposedly backwards compatible with PCI32 but I have not tested that. It supports up to 15 devices. However not all drives you can buy can be configured above SCSI ID 7.
Reliability
I've used this controller for over 2 years now and I have not seen any problems with it.
