CompuServe Thread

Although have the chance to deliver with really big machines and different solutions in the mag lab is a info source, I'm sure that here are more people with lot of more tech experience than me (this thing has become a game, nearly) Certainly, any device that needs maximun I/O, needs the widest and fastest bus you can find around. Accessing hard drives and storage systems is one of those. When there is a bottleneck, systems performance goes gown, that's pure logic. However, there are functions when the ISA bus will give plenty space and speed: sound cards are a good example of that. As someone said before, you won't need a high speed bus if your board or device don't need it. If your max troughput is 1.3MB/sec what in the hell you need a 30MB/sec bus? VLB gives a direct 32 bit data path to the processor at processor speed, so it will break most bottlenecks=fastest transfers=maximun system performance. Video was the obvious application for "direct bus" technology, like VLB, but you can put up there every card that need more throughtput level that the ISA or EISA bus will give ever. I don't know if Adaptec has a VLB board, but I have read that someone has see one. Anyway, if you are looking for one, always ask for ASPI in hardware, NO by software layers. Does anyone has any benchmarks? Ana

John, PMJI, there was an article in PC Magazine recently about SCSI issues. The Ultrastor 34F (?) which is a SCSI II fast vlb card was very fast when coupled with a SCSI II fast drive – they weren't very specific about speeds but it seemed to be several times faster than IDE, ESDI, and SCSI-I combos. My next hard-disk will probably be a SCSI fast combo.