PC Tech: Floppies, Modems, etc.

In My Humble Opinion
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      • I yam building a PC: Asus A7VA66 w/T-Bird 1.2 + 256 megs DDR is already here. Case was ordered today (Antec SX840). I have a 20G HD to put in it, an ATI Rage Pro Fury videocard and SBL soundcard. Coupla questions though:
  • I will have a floppy, a HD, a CD-R and a DVD. And probably another HD in a while, but there’s nowhere left to hook it up. What’s this SCSI business? Do I just get an SCSI card, and then plug the second HD’s lines into that? Or does it need some special HD? I had planned to leave the master HD on the regular board hookup.
  • Seems like I saw floppies that were rated for 3.1? Megs? -!- These weren’t 300 meg superdisks, but regular floppies. Which is still fairly useless, compared to CD-R’s, but where do you get a floppy drive that does this? Should I care?
  • The board I got has an ACR: Advanced Communication Riser. A special slot, for a special way of communicating, that is specially hard to get, apparently. Where do you get something that plugs into this? Every internal modem I think I’ve seen is a PCI or the old-type ASI slot…
  • Related: Does anyone still make internal 56K hardware modems anymore? I’d rather not have another cord to plug in, and someday Linux may become much more useful to me that it is now…
    ~
  • MC
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SCSI is a different protocol from ATA (which is the child of EIDE and the grandchild of IDE). SCSI does not support a mere 2 devices per bus (master and slave) but instead, depending on the iteration of SCSI (SCSI-1, SCSI-2, fast SCSI, SCSI fast & wide, SCSI III, etc), supports from 7 devices on up to (I think) 15, all of which are equal players.

You can boot from any of them.

You can daisy-chain them. Internally, they usually use 50-pin cable. Externally, they usually daisy-chain using Centronix 50 for SCSI 1 and various other 50 to 68 pin cables & connectors for more advanced SCSI variants.

Unless you are comparing the basic SCSI-1 to the fastest ATA bus, SCSI is faster.

SCSI devices must each have their own unique address on the SCSI bus. These addresses are set by jumpers or, for external devices or the more sophisticated of internals, by an address selector knob. The SCSI bus is supposed to be terminated at both ends. Most SCSI cards (or motherboards with built-in SCSI like older Macs) have their own termination. Many modern SCSI devices can also self-terminate, usually by flipping a termination switch or setting a termination jumper. A few really snazzy ones can auto-sense the need to terminate and become terminated on an as-needed basis.

SCSI devices are not powered by their data connectors, but, like ATA devices, generally have a 4-pin power plug. Externals usually have a 3-prong power cord connector.

SCSI hard drives are more expensive per gigabyte than ATA hard drives.

SCSI hard drives for laptops (2.5") are overwhelmingly more expensive per gigabyte than ATA hard drives, and don’t come in very large sizes. Not much call for them–only old Apple PowerBooks need them.

SCSI, in addition to being faster than ATA (except for significant overlap between SCSI-1 and the fastest ATA), is faster than USB, much faster than PC parallel, much faster than traditional serial (Mac or PC); USB 2 could theoreticallly compete with all but the highest-end SCSI, but not if the USB-2 bus has anything else on it, and in practice I don’t think there are any fully optimized USB-2 hard drives. FireWire, aka IEEE 1394, is also theoretically faster than all but the very highest end of SCSI buses and drives, but again, in practice, FireWire drives are usually ATA drives with an adapter that puts them on the FireWire bus. (FireWire is still cool because of hot-swappability and the lack of any need to set addresses, though).

SCSI stands for Small Computer Systems Interface. It is a parallel standard. (The cables are big thick umbilical-cord cables).

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You do have room for another hard drive. The floppy drive runs on its own channel. Set the first hard drive as master and the second hard drive as slave on IDE channel 1, and set the CD-R as master and the DVD as slave on IDE channel 2.

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      • I ain’t put it together yet, but the (old) existing PII has only four places to connect a drive, and the floppy uses one of them. Are newer systems different in this regard? - MC
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Ahunter3:
Verrrry good explanation of SCSI.

MC:
A SCSI card can come in PCI or IDE. You plug it nto the appropriate slot (like you would a sound card, for instance.) It has internal connections, so you can use it to run a drive, and external connections, for … well, external things. They are notably finicky. I had a SCSI CD-RW which never did play well in a Dell, but worked first time in a no-name mid-tower.
The popularity of firewire and USB devices seems to be pushing SCSI to extinction.

MC & Smitty:
The CD and DVD on the same channel is fine. It becomes problematic when one is a CD-W or CD-RW. Sharing the same channel on devices which are used at the same time will slow down transfer rates, and in the case of a CD-R and CD-RW being used as a source and target of copying, can cause buffer overruns.

Never heard of such floppies. Sorry.

As for ACR:
Check out http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/0,,30_2252_910,00.html
which says:

With controllers built into chipsets, and the availability of untapped microprocessor horsepower, ACR enables rich, multi-channel audio and high-speed network connectivity over LAN & WAN in both client and server configurations on a single riser card.

Modems can be had for about $45. Go to
http://www.internetmall.com/48012043310/visitstore?catid=search&product_id=496158&offset=1&keywords=modem&search=products

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I like external modems. They are easy to reset without rebooting and they aren’t “Winmodems” that use part of the microprocessor.

Anyone know how superdisks behave if you have to boot from a floppy without your OS?

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You can get a USR PCI 56k modem at Staples or Circuit City for $49.00. Might be on sale right now for a little less.

Hope you got the right operating system for that MC, so that it all works together. Me might be okay but you can wait a couple days for XP.

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      • Hmmmm…
  • AMR modems seem to be widely considered (by people who don’t make them) as pieces 'o crap.
    Oh well, USR/serial/external it is.
  • handy: The newest parts are the SBL card and a CD-R drive, that I already had running 100% correctly under 98. The upgraded videocard (ATI Rage Pro Fury) didn’t work right, but I have already traced that to the lamer OEM motherboard, and there aren’t any videocard drivers specific for XP anyway.
    What would I need XP for? - MC
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1: Each of the IDE connections on the MB can handle two IDE devices. That is why most (not all) IDE cables have two connectors in addition to the connector for the MB. So your drive and CD connection problem is solved. You have room for 4 devices built in.

2: Pure hardware internal modems their own onboard controllers are still available. The are now known as “gamer modems” and are more expensive than winmodems.
http://www.usr.com/support/overview-template.asp?prod=s-game

3: Yes there was spec for a (IIRC) 2.88 meg floppy being pushed by IBM several years ago. Some IBM’s shipped with this floppy but the standard never became popular. Many MB BIOS’s have the ability to connect a 2.88 meg floppy if you ever got your hands on one but media is likely to be difficult to get and the small gain is not really worth it. You can probably get one of these on Ebay if you are determined to have one.

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“videocard drivers specific for XP anyway.”

There should be for ATI products. I really think that ATI talks to the people at Microsoft. I met a guy who wrote drivers for video cards he told me lots of times the card guys don’t talk to the OS guys or the board guys. I use Rage Fury with ME & it went in just perfect.

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      • Okay I looked again: each drive has a ribbon cable, and a four-conductor power line. The floppy has its own little ribbon cable with two connectors, and there’s two big ribbon cables for HD’s and CD’s. Problem is there’s only two power cables, with two power plugs on each, which is four. Is there a cheater-type plug you buy or something?
        Or is this just another instance of Acer cheapness?
  • The 3.1 meg floppy I saw referenced might have used compression or something, I didn’t look real close. - MC
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I have cut plugs off a junker power supply and spliced them onto a good one. You have to watch the power rating of the PS, of course.

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If you are short on power cables one to two power adapters are available at any Radio Shack for two dollars each. THe floppy uses a smaller power cable

5.25-Inch to Dual 5.25-Inch Internal Power Cable
$1.99 Reg. Price Brand: Aesp
Cat.#: 950-0323

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I think I answered the 3 meg mystery floppy question a few posts back but here is more info. for you. 3.1 megs would possibly be the unformatted size of the 2.88 meg floppy.

http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/archive/ineedopt.html

“Tape drives are often seen as the answer to backup problems but many users find them to be unreliable and the sequential manner of storing data on tape makes them awkward. So what are you going to do? IBM’s 2.88 floppies seem to have flopped—they just aren’t that much bigger.”

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Yeah you can get a power cable splitter. You better have at least 200 watts though for all that stuff. My athlon requires that much in the manual.

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Your manual has a power supply?
:slight_smile:

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Not all internal modems are Winmodems. Only the really cheap ones are.

If you’re still using dial-up, MC, you might try a call-waiting modem, which allows you to receive phone calls without completely losing your Internet connection. Last I checked, though, they’re easily twice (or thrice) as expension as regular Fax modems.

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I didn’t say they were, Lord Vader.
:slight_smile:

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      • Okay, next question: does installing the OS set anything concerning the motherboard? I am going to put the new HD in the old PC, use the Acer OEM disk to install Win98, and then put the new HD into the new PC. I know that XP detects this, but what I am wondering is if I should install all the “new” component drivers onto the new HD while it’s in the old PC or wait until it’s in the new one.
        ~
  • Also, how do you “revert” to a previous videocard driver?
    This has bugged me for some time. When I installed the new videocard in the old PC, both were ATI’s and I guess the old had enough files to run a 640x480x16 color display. When I decided to buy a new PC part by part, I removed the new videocard (ATI AGP 2X 32Meg) and found that the old one (ATI AGP 1X 2M) wouldn’t work at all anymore, and I couldn’t get it to work. The screen wouldn’t display at all except during the BIOS/boot. I chose to reinstall Win98, but would it have mattered if I had turned the screen resolution down to 640x480x16 and the hardware accelleration completely off before trying? - MC
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In the Bios there is usually a setting, sometimes called nvram but not always called that. WHat it does is remember exactly what cards you have in the system. So it thinks the same stuff is always there everytime you turn the computer on. Now if you change cards, it think that the old ones are still there & so presto! no booto! You have to look around in your Bios book to see if there is a setting for clearing that setting.