Seagate Cheetah on a Tekram

[Fritz44]

Ok....so I configured my first SCSI rig last night and it went surprisingly easy -- that it what leads to my suspicions. I put a Seagate Cheetah Ultra 160 SCSI drive on a Tekram SCSI 160 adapter and it all seemed to configure itself with the exception of having to specify through the adapter's BIOS that the SCSI drive was bootable.

I had heard that it was a routine to create a 3 1/2" boot floppy for the adapter and hit F6 at Windows setup to install the card drivers before Windows installed. Last night, however, I forgot to make this disk and Windows seemed to install without a hitch anyway. It is also identified as the proper card in System Devices twice (two channels on the card I guess).

If its running and seems to be identified in System Devices, is it safe to assume that all is well despite not having remembered to use the adapter boot disk? And if so, what is this disk otherwise used for?

Are there any good hardrive benchmarks I can use to insure that I'm getting the max performance out of this setup, and what should the numbers be?

Thanks, Fritz44

[BipolarBill]

I don't know about the numbers, but Windows 2000 and XP both have the drivers for the Tekram in the Setup database. They don't have the latest ones though. You should check for an update with Windows Update at least.

HDTach is an excellent HDD tool. It's not as complete as WinBench, but it's a great start.

http://www.tcdlabs.com/hdtach.htm

http://www.etestinglabs.com/benchmarks/winbench/winbench.asp

[Philip1952]

As of right now. XP has the current drivers for tekram cards and some of the adaptec cards also.
I have installed a tekram DC390U3W and a Adaptec 29160. In the last two months. XP had drivers for both.
So you sould be all right on the card.

HDDtach> you need to buy the full version for it to work on XP.:(

The disk you are talking about would be used if you needed SCSI cd-rom support to load an OS. It sounds like you have an IDE cd-rom so you didn't need the disk. The bios can see a IDE cd-rom. It can not see a SCSI cd-rom with out the drivers. From what I have read. I loaded from IDE cd-rom. So I didn't use the disk eather. Next time I will have to. No IDE on this box now.

[Fritz44]

Thankya.......thankya very much.

[Peter M]

Fritz, yes, the card uses an LSI Symbios 53C1010 dual channel SCSI engine. Picking up the latest drivers from www.lsilogic.com won't hurt.

regards, Peter

[Fritz44]

They haven't got any........but thanks Pete!

http://www.lsilogic.com/support/select/winxp.html

[otheos]

The U3W needs the driver disk and F6 process only with W2K. WinXP will load fine.

Get yourself the drivers from here (ftp://ftp.lsil.com/pub/symchips/scsi/drivers/Windows_Drivers/) and if they're newer install them otherwise leave the default ones.

However check the reg patches that come along with these drivers as they offer some tuning (such as enable/disable domain validation, change the i/o's etc). Read the README file and apply accordingly.

Also make sure you have updated the card's bios to the latest version (4.19) available from tekram or LSI.

Finally see my homepage for a couple of tips and info on the Tekram cards :)

[Fritz44]

Thanks for the tips........I found that I was running BIOS version 4.18 and I flashed to 4.19 without a hitch. It only took about 10 seconds to flash the BIOS once I specified the .rom file.

Yers truly..........Fritz44