Future Domain SCSI controller for A

[neese at cpe.UUCP]

>for our '286 machines. A local dealer has recommended the
>Future Domain SCSI controller and claims this works with
>Xenix/Unix and that someone has this setup using Microport.
>    Has anyone had any experience with this board ?

The FD board is a nice board, but it is a dumb board and requires the COPU
to do everything (i.e. high overhead).

>    Does this imply a special version of Xenix ?

I think, in this case, it is a generic SCO product that you can run this with.

>    Is this board related in anyway to the Tandy SCSI board ?
>	(I though the Tandy board was micro channel only)

No, the Tandy board is the Adaptec SCSI AHA-1540 board.  Very intelligent.
It is an AT board, the MC board is not shipping yet.

>    Is there a better Xenix/SCSI combination ?

Without sounding like a commercial, I will elaborate on the features of the
Tandy board.  The board has a programmable high speed DMA (up to 10MBytes/sec),
command queuing (up to 255 commands), transparent SCSI bus arbitration,
programmable bus on/off times, INT13 compatible BIOS, programmable mailbox
architecture, automatic request sense information for errors, async/sync 
support transparently, and some other features that require hard drive vendors
to implement.

>    Any clues or experiences would be appreciated. I'd love to
>use SCSI as my main disk interface, but am I going to have to
>run Microport to do this ?

Tandy sells a version of SCO (2.2.4) which has support for the AHA-1540 
(Tandy 25-4161) built in.  You can boot from the SCSI drive or use it as
a secondary and boot from an ST-506 drive.  2.2.4 and 2.2.3 are virtually
the same except for the SCSI support in 2.2.4.  The SCSI driver for 2.2.4
is a true multi-threaded driver.  The driver also supports several SCSI tape
drives.  Neal Nelson has benchmarked a Tandy 4000 (16Mhz 386) with a SCSI
80MB and 170MB.  Call them for the results.
We have been using the SCSI stuff here for about 6 months and haven't had a
problem.  One of the systems is configured with a 80MB, 344MB and 150MB tape.
Another system is configured with a 40MB and 80MB drives.  The systems
really run quite well (translate to: scream).  One system is a news/note
gateway and the other is a 16 user system.  Both see an extreme amount of
disk I/O and we haven't had any trouble with either.  Of course in all
fairness, we are an engineering site with several very experienced Xenix
people on board, but I don't see why anyone would have problems with the
implementation.

					Roy Neese
					Tandy Computer Product Engineering
					UUCP@ {killer, ninja}!cpe!neese