[comp.periphs] Question on Adaptec 4070: data transfer rate?

soohong@cs.psu.edu (Soohong Kim) (02/25/90)

Could anyone kindly answer my question?
What does the following excerpt from ACB-4000 series user's manual would mean:
	"Jumper G-H is used to select two DMA transfer rates on the SCSI bus.
When removed, the controller will transfer data at the maximum rate allowed
by the controller, equal to DATACLOCK/2. Some host adapters cannot support
this data rate. When this jumper is installed, the data transfer rate is
reduced to run at a rate of SYSCLOCK/4 on single sector transfers. This is
one-half of the controller's maximum DMA speed. Multisector transfers are
always made at the maximum rate of DATACLOCK/2, with or without this jumper."

In fact, I am using Adaptec 4070 (ST-506 to SCSI converter) for my
*IBM-incompatible* PC. The host adaptor with which 4070 is connected is a
home-brewed one and it uses DMA. As long as I know, since all transfer over
the SCSI bus is based on asynchronous REQ/ACK handshaking, the term "clock"
does not apply here, right? (I am sure that I am not using synchronous SCSI
and there is nothing in the manual saying synchronous data transfer over the
SCSI bus is supported by this controller.) But, indeed, as I experiment with
my system, it would not transfer data correctly (I didn't try to see if
overrun occurs) if I remove the jumper to select the maximum clock rate.
I am very curious why this happens. But being a poor student I have no good
equipments to unveil the mistery :-(.

Any opinion? Please reply via e-mail.
Thank you in advance.
---Soohong (soohong@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu)
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