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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RagTimeBand who wrote (4438)	12/25/1998 12:33:00 AM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

I thought an Adaptec 2940U2W coupled with a Segate Barracuda Ultra 2 had much better through-put than any IDE setup. Am I wrong? The SCSI U2W bus is a lot faster than IDE. That does not mean you will get better performance. Check out harddrive seek times, cache and sustained data transfer rates. You will find marginal differences that generally will not translate into significant performance gains. Your biggest performance gains will be CPU and RAM based. I am posting from a machine with SCSI U2W and I do not think it does anything to increase my performance. >>Sometimes with SCSI base components it is difficult to get a machine up and running.<< ____________ I'd say that's another good reason to buy a system from someone like Minotaur :-) _______________________________________________________ Agreed. I use several SCSI based machines. The original configuration was "by others". I prefer the SCSI machines especially when it is someone else's money. I'm still thinking I'd like to go SCSI. In order to go "completely SCSI" I'll have to have a SCSI floppy too. Do they make SCSI floppies? I do not think so. The closest thing is the LS120 and you have already determined that it will not boot. I heard tale of another Sony? 3 1/2 in format soon to be released that is floppy compatible. I know nothing about it. I would assume it has bleeding edge compatibility problems. I will celebrate the day we get rid of floppies but we are not there yet. To be sure I understand what you're saying: if I buy a system from Minotaur and it's completely SCSI, I'll have to request that they disable the IDE controller. If you want to gain the IRQ's you can disable it. The IDE controller in my computer uses IRQ 14 and IRQ 15. I think this is common. My SCSI controller uses one IRQ. With the IDE controller you get a maximum of 4 devices and use two IRQ's. With a SCSI controller you use one IRQ and can have 7 or more devices depending on the SCSI controller. It's my own fault. I've resisted upgrading my system because I went through a lot of pain (many, many calls to Microsoft tech support) to write some programs that I use for investing. Since then Microsoft has discontinued free support and I'm sure the latest versions of Excel would barf if I tried to run my programs; I am in a similar situation with some of my old DOS apps. I knew I was heading for trouble when I opted to customize. I had to do it because of the time savings. I would think you can run your old version of Excel on the new machine. I still use QPRO 4.0 DOS on an NT machine. Another option would be to clone or use your old harddrive and boot to it when you want to run your old apps...they will run a LOT faster. 25MHz 386 DX with 8MB of RAM. You are going to like your new machine. Zeuspaul