PC Hacks 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools

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Hack 16 Configure SCSI Host Adapters

Accommodate SCSI host adapters with nonconflicting configurations.

A SCSI interface is one of the best ways to add lots of devices—hard drives, CD-ROM or DVD drives, cartridge or tape drives, even some of the high-end graphics scanners—to your PC without using up a lot of resources. Very fast SCSI adapters and hard drives are used in servers, and most high-capacity server-grade backup tape systems use the SCSI interface because SCSI is simply faster and allows for more drive configurations like RAID.

Because of the performance offered by SCSI host adapters, you should have at least a PCI card. ISA cards are simply incapable of supporting the speeds required by today's SCSI drives.

Most SCSI adapters are readily identified and their configurations determined and reported by Windows Device Manager and readily available PC system information programs.

Some of you may still be using 16-bit ISA SCSI adapters. As with the sound card, if you cannot configure the system to provide the host adapter with exclusive uninterrupted access to IRQ and DMA resources, an upgrade to a PCI-based adapter is your only solution, and you'll get a huge performance boost as well.

A SCSI host adapter may contain User BIOS, so adding a SCSI host adapter to your system might require you to enable scanning the User BIOS Region of memory [Hack #4].

2.7.1 IEEE-1394

As a means of connecting external devices, SCSI has been great for scanners and assorted storage devices, but it has not been forgiving or flexible in cable lengths nor as fast as newer technologies. Save SCSI for internal storage devices and high-performance server disk drive arrays, but upgrade your external peripherals—scanners, add-on and portable storage devices—to either USB 2.0 or IEEE-1394 (aka FireWire, aka i.Link). With USB or IEEE-1394, you also get the capability to add many more and different devices such as digital cameras, video recorders, printers, business card readers, SMART cards, and a variety of flash memory readers.

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