ok i am getting a controller card and ibm 15000 rpm drive 36z15 thru
The LSI is a 64bit controller, so you need enough space in your case to plug it in. It will be longer than a 32 PCI slot but should fit into one. If you dont have any other PCI card installed, any slot will do. The ID for the controller usually defaults to 8 or 16, you dont have
to change that. When you put in only a single drive, you dont have to worry about its ID, just plug it in. The controller should recognize it and show you its factory default ID. If you want to change it you need to look into the manual of the HD. There should be some jumpers on the drive. In the status of the LSI controller you should also check the connection speed. It should be at least 80MB/s (would be sufficient for a single drive) but since you have an u160 controller and disk it should be 160MB/s. If the cable and termination is not correct the transfer speed will be lowered.
A cooler is a good choice but not nescessary if the case has sufficient cooling. Be prepared that these drives will still be hot.
During boot the SCSI Bios should pop up and display some infos. You should be able to choose the controller configuration menu from here. You can leave the IDE raid on but if you disable it you might save some seconds during booting.
I dont know if LSI is identified automatically from your OS. I m running W2K and for a fresh install i need to press F6 during setup to include the drivers from a floppy.
The drive shows then as normal harddisk like any other drive and can be paritioned and formatted.
There might be problems if you have some IDE drives in your PC, too. In this case you need to ensure that your SCSI drive is recognized as first HD (C: and not D: when you want to boot from SCSI).
Simply speaking, theres not that much that could be done wrong.
Good luck anyway