dlou@sdcc13.ucsd.edu (Dennis Lou) (05/01/91)
Well, I asked about MAST and their Starblazer board, and that turned out to be rather discouraging, so it's now time to solicit alternatives. I was wondering if anyone had any experience with the Fastrack by Xetec or the Starboard ][ by Microbotics. I need a board or a combination of boards that will give me more RAM and a hard drive controller for my A1000. The Starboard is a memory board that has a SCSI daughterboard option. The Fastrack seems to be a SCSI board that has a FastRAM connector on it. Can anyone recommend any other boards that will give me SCSI and RAM for my A1000? -- Dennis Lou || "But Yossarian, what if everyone thought that way?" dlou@ucsd.edu || "Then I'd be crazy to think any other way!" [backbone]!ucsd!dlou |+==================================================== dlou@ucsd.BITNET |Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak went to my high school.
tomb@hplsla.HP.COM (Tom Bruhns) (05/02/91)
RE: A-1000 RAM/Hard drive expansion I'm using a Starboard II and StarDrive. Seems to work fine. The drive interface can be a bit slow if you don't invoke 'fastmode', but with it invoked, I believe the read rates are over 100kbytes/sec, which is fast enough that it doesn't get in my way. StarBoards autoconfigure, but booting still requires a floppy. I don't think you will get away from that on a stock A-1000. Of course you can boot from RAD: if you are doing a warm reboot, but cold boots start with the floppy. I had a large quantity of ram chips a while back, many of which I put into StarBoards, so I got an opportunity to check quite a few of them. I found them to generally be well-built, and out of over ten of them, had no StarBoard-related failures. However, they do seem to load the A-1000's bus pretty heavily, and I found that most A-1000's can't stand two of them at once. My A-1000 would take one StarBoard, or one StarBoard and one 'BareBoards' (no longer in business??), which has very light bus loading, if I put a bus terminator on it. But I never got two StarBoards working on it. On a few other A-1000's I've seen, even one StarBoard had trouble without the bus terminator. I wouldn't let that discourage you, though: I've had my Starboard going pretty much continuously for three years now without a hitch, and I'm sure I would have heard from some of the customers for the others I put together if there had been serious problems with theirs. BTW, pardon the semi-commercialism, but I still have a few megs of the chips; I'll beat 'any advertised price' and guarantee them to work (if not abused). Tom Bruhns tomb@hplsla.hp.com
fhwri%CONNCOLL.BITNET@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu (05/03/91)
> two of them at once. My A-1000 would take one StarBoar > and one 'BareBoards' (no longer in business??), which has very light bus > loading, if I put a bus terminator on it. But I never got two StarBoards > working on it. On a few other A-1000's I've seen, even one StarBoard had > trouble without the bus terminator. I wouldn't let that discourage you, > though: I've had my Starboard going pretty much continuously for three > years now without a hitch, and I'm sure I would have heard from some of > the customers for the others I put together if there had been serious > problems with theirs. Bare Boards is indeed out of business (I still have mine--which they didn't send with a passthru...) I have a friend whose 1000 has two Starboards AND a 1000 LIVE! board, and no problems. Just FYI... --Rick Wrigley fhwri@conncoll.bitnet