Adapted 2940UW & LVD hard drives ?

[jose]

Hi everybody,

I ordered 7 LVD controllers from computergiants and received these adaptec 2940UW controllers which are not LVD controllers.

I also purchased 7 - 15k 36g MAS hard drives & 7 lvd cables & terminators.


Well computergiants has the description wrong on their website and I did call before to verify that it was indeed a LVD controller. They said it was..

Once I received the UW controllers I was disappointed because of the extra cost I'd have to pay to get another controller from somewhere else and all the time lost spent shipping & ordering new controllers.

Well I did test one controller w/ the LVD cable & hard drive and it does seem to work.


Do you guys know that it will work or do I have to order new controllers.

These's are going into 7 workstation builds that only do email/office stuff.


Thanks for the help.


Regards,
Jose

 

[SuperNaruto]

AHA-2940 UW ? http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/support/scsi/2940/AHA-2940UW/

its a 40mb card... ide/sata will be faster for it

If you're mas drive are u160 or u320, this controller will be the bottle neck.. at 40..

 

[Zepper]

the 2940UW is Single Ended, NOT LVD. Most LVD drives have automatic sensing and will drop back to SE if they detect that type of host bus adapter (not called "controller" in scuzzy), cable and/or termination or you can jumper them to SE to be sure. So your bandwidth is 40MB/sec max. They will work but I would want to be sure the cables and terminators you have are all SE compatible. If the drives are all 68-pin, they probably have internal termination that can be Enabled/Disabled by jumper but the internal termination may only work with LVD. Check the mfr's spec sheet to be sure. If that turns out to be the case, then you will need external SE termination. With internal termination and the drive being the only one on the cable (in socket at the far end) set TE Enabled and TP (terminator power) Disabled, with external terminator the drive is in the next to the last connector (terminator occupies the end connector) and TE is Disabled and TP is Enabled.

I have a really nice (LSI-based) Tekram DC-390U2W (U-80) HBA if you're interested. It has a stub interface so you can run both SE and LVD devices at the same time. Or I have an LSI U-160 HBA that can support only SE or LVD devices at any given time - this would allow more devices to run at full speed at a given time than the U-80 (all HBAs have shared bandwidth on a given channel). Let me know.

See SCSIfaq.org for lots of scuzzy info and links to sources.

See the trouble one gets in trying to save a little money... ? With larger (than the scuzzies that you got) PATA or SATA drives selling for less than $50. straight up I don't think it was a wise savings. Now if you knew scuzzy inside and out, then it may not have been too bad of an idea. The way it is, disaster lurks...

.bh.