FW: [ale] UPS/Scanner

[Stephen G Lewis]

> On Wednesday, January 29, 1997 4:15 PM Micheal Morris <mjm at avana.net> wrote:
> ...
> Also, has anyone hooked a Microtek E3 scanner to their system. It comes
> with an Adaptec 1502E ISA SCSI card (make by Adapted for Microtek). I
> would like to hook-up this scanner and a SCSI Zip drive from the
> supplied SCSI card. Are there any tricks to setting this up or special
> scanning software that I will need?

----
I have the same scanner, and it came with the same card.  I haven't tried to use it
with Linux yet, but I'm reasonably sure that you will have nothing but trouble trying
to use the supplied SCSI card with anything but the scanner.  To quote the docs
that came with my card:
   The AVA-1502E ISA-to-SCSI host adapter is ... for connecting a single, nonbootable
   external SCSI device to your PC.
   The AVA-1502E host adapter supports 2.0 Mbytes/sec asynchronous and 5.0
   Mbytes/sec synchronous SCSI data transfer rates.
A "Real" SCSI card supports upto seven devices at 10 Mbytes/sec.  Fast-and-wide
SCSI supports even faster data rates.  The 1502 is a cheap card with a non-standard
DB-25 connector and slow speed designed as an interface to the slow SCSI port on
the scanner.  Normal SCSI connectors are either a 50-pin Centronics-style (sort of a
long printer port) or a sub-miniture DB-50 (much smaller, more closely packed pins
than a standard RS-232 connector).  You would have little luck setting up your
proposed system under DOS, much less Linux.

I use an Adapter AH-2940 on my system with the Microtek E3 scanner, a NEC
4xi CD-ROM, and a HP JetStore 5000 4mm DAT drive.  I have also successfully
used an Adaptec AH-1520.  Both of these cards have worked well for me in Linux,
DOS, and Windows.  I believe that there are some less expensive cards that will
work as well, but I don't have any experience with any others.

The Microtek scanner can only work at a data rate of 5Mbytes/sec.  The AH-1520
can only opperate at one speed with all devices, so to use it with the scanner, I
had to slow it down to half speed for everything.  The AH-2940 can be configured
to communicate at different rates to different devices, so it can slow down when
talking to the scanner, yet talk to the CD-ROM and tape drive at the full 10
Mbyte/sec rate.