[ale] NCR 53c810 question from Joe

[Steven A. DuChene]

> 
> I would be interested in hearing about people's experience with cheapo
> 53C810 cards. I bought one of these a few months back when I was
> planning to get a SCSI CD-ROM drive, but I found that compiling in the
> driver for it caused my system to hang randomly. (Naturally, I don't
> know this *for absolute sure* -- but when I took out the driver, the
> system quit hanging. The card was in the machine, but had no devices
> attached to it. Could that cause a hang?)
> 
	These cards work very well but if you are going to use one I would
	advise you to upgrade to the latest development kernels (1.3.95 now)
	since they have a much newer version of the driver (version 17
	verses version 4 in the 1.2.X kernels). Second point, if you had one
	stuck into your machine and no devices hung off of it, you most
	likely had no termination on the internal and possibly the external
	SCSI bus connectors. This is a BAD thing! No wonder your machine
	hung randomly. On the internal bus the last device in the chain
	usually provides termination. On my card there is a jumper that
	turns on passive termination for the external bus however if you
	plan on getting the most out of the card when you actually do
	connect devices to it get a active terminator since you are then
	able to turn on syncronous FAST SCSI-II transfers in the driver.
	Passive termination does not work as well so it limits the
	performance of the driver and card.

-- 
Steven A. DuChene       Linux Weenie!    http://www.ysu.edu/~sduchene

		isollae - loneliness in the face of beauty
		    -- Sean Russell, "World Without End"