ben@epmooch.UUCP (Rev. Ben A. Mesander) (04/27/91)
>In article <8861@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> meyera@iris.ucdavis.edu (Alan T. Meyer) writes: >I was wondering if anyone out there owns the TMC 885 controller for two reasons. Surely someone owns one. You don't have to wonder :-) [...] >Second, does it take a long time for your computer to boot? Mine takes about >ten extra seconds because of the controller. It kinda gets tiresome. So Id >like to know if Future Domain has a bios upgrade to solve this problem.. How often do you reboot anyway? 10 seconds?? Sheesh. Seriously, I used a TMC 885 controller for a while. We thought the name "Future Domain" was pretty funny, because it was a bit slow to drive our Wren's with. "When are you going to get the data from the drive?" "Oh, in the Future... Domain." We went to different controllers. Seriously, though, is there now a speedier version? The TMC 885, as I remember, had few of the compatability problems we ran into with some of the other SCSI controllers on the market. BTW, I don't care if it takes an extra ten seconds to boot my machine... From my knowledge of SCSI, I would guess the delay is there because the interface waits a while before it looks for SCSI devices on the bus. Some SCSI drives take quite a while to come ready upon powerup, and if you look for them right away, you may not find them. Otherwise, you run into problems like the Mac had with early Wren VII's with 1 meg of buffer space - the Wren is still doing a powerup RAM test on its buffer to decide if it's sick or not, and the Mac is looking for things that will answer on the SCSI bus. >alan meyer -- | ben@epmooch.UUCP (Ben Mesander) | "Cash is more important than | | ben%servalan.UUCP@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu | your mother." - Al Shugart, | | !chinet!uokmax!servalan!epmooch!ben | CEO, Seagate Technologies |
meyera@iris.ucdavis.edu (Alan T. Meyer) (04/27/91)
I was wondering if anyone out there owns the TMC 885 controller for two reasons. First, since the controller can support up to four floppies with a software driver, I wanted to know how the driver works and if its easy to use. I want it pretty bad.. Second, does it take a long time for your computer to boot? Mine takes about ten extra seconds because of the controller. It kinda gets tiresome. So Id like to know if Future Domain has a bios upgrade to solve this problem.. If you get a chance, mail me "meyera@iris.ucdavis.edu" or try to post, please. Thanks in advance..... alan meyer
meyera@iris.ucdavis.edu (Alan T. Meyer) (05/05/91)
Hello, I asked earlier if anyone knew about the time it takes to boot a computer with the future domain scsi controller. Thanks to all that replied. I'd like to show what I found. The controller waits to look for all of your devices, about 10 secs. However, it wouldn't need to if you could tell it yourself what you have attached to the controller. So, removing the bios on the card will disable it from searching for the scsi devices. The problem then is that your scsi deviceswill not be reckgonized. However, the problem can be solved by writing a sys driver which performs the same actions which the bios on the controller normallydoes. So, what I am wondering now is if the controller bios changes only interrupt 13.If so, I can capture the int 13 routine setup by the controller bios and install it myself evertime I boot.(I think) I am not a good programmer by any means, so any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance... alan meyer meyera@iris.ucdavis.edu