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From: "Andrew V. Stesin" <stesin@elvisti.kiev.ua>
Message-Id: <199508161551.SAA07694@office.elvisti.kiev.ua>
Subject: Re: NCR or Adaptec?
To: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au (Michael Smith)
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 1995 18:51:29 +0300 (EET DST)
Cc: hardware@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199508160807.RAA28115@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> from "Michael Smith" at Aug 16, 95 05:37:24 pm
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Dear Mike,

# I'm in the process of speccing up my new PCI wonderbox, and I'm 
# looking for commentary on the relative merits of NCR 53C810 vs. Adaptec
# 2940 when it comes to PCI SCSI controllers.
# 
# The particular NCR card I'm being quoted on is the ASUS PCI SC200.
# 
[...]
# Any comments?  If the Adaptec is worth the extra $300 or so, I'll bite.
# 

	of course, YMMV, but:

	a while ago I tested PCI Adaptec with 7870 chip on it
	against the NCR 53c810-based single-chip controller (SP-810)
	on _the same_ hardware, this means that the box, the motherboard,
	the 2 1Gb IBM disk drives and the CDROM were the same,
	the P90 CPU and 32M of RAM were the same,
	just only HBA changed, and FreeBSD-2.0.5
	was the same installation, even the directory where iozone ran
	was the same.

	iozone 128 8192 gave:

	3.2/3.4 Mb/sec for Adaptec;
	4.0/4.1 Mb/sec for NCR.

	So both are good, and congratulations to the authors of both
	drivers; BUT:
	maybe I'm crazy, but $70 NCR won vs. $350 Adaptec with 20% speedup!

	I think that both the driver is great, and the overhead
	on a simple single-chip NCR is significantly lower than
	on Adaptec, especially considering it's 2-lawyer software/firmware
	design. Or am I missing smth?

-- 

	With best wishes -- Andrew Stesin, Elvisti.Kiev.UA sysadmin.