Boot From SCSI Device?

[nulldev]

I hope this is in the right forum! I am looking at building a new system and am considering making it SCSI based instead of EIDE.

Back when I was hot and heavy into SCSI, to be able to boot a machine, the motherboard had to have "integrated SCSI". Has this changed at all? Could I buy a SCSI card, say by Adaptec, and be able to boot off a hard disk attached to the card?

I used to have a machine with a Future Domain SCSI card that wouldn't be recognized until after drivers were loaded, so that's why I'm wondering if the mobo needs to have integrated to be able to boot from SCSI.

Thanks!

(BTW, what's everyones opinion on firewire? Too expensive still or worth it?)

 

[Caitiff]

You don't have to have integrated scsi to boot to it. Any good scsi card that has a rom bios will usually let you boot to it. I too have the Future Domain scsi card that you mention. When Adaptec bought them out, they took the same card and put a bios on it, now it's bootable! Anyway, if you look on the advertisements for most scsi cards, they'll tell you if they are bootable or not.

 

[Pariah]

So long as the card has a SCSI BIOS, which practically all mid to high end cards have, you can boot off of it.

Firewire doesn't have any real benefits of SCSI for desktops. I picked up a 80GB firewire drive for my laptop, and I couldn't be happier with it. All the portable storage I will need for a long time.

 

[owensdj]

nulldev, you can still boot from a SCSI hard drive even if you have an add-on SCSI card, rather than a SCSI chipset integrated into your mainboard. Keep in mind that the add-on SCSI card must have a built-in BIOS for it to support booting.