Do SCSI computers boot slower?

Platyply

Member
Nov 24, 2000
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Hi, I am building a system with a SCSI drive as the primary boot HD. Will this slow down boot time as the computer has to access the SCSI Adapter card? My next question is are there any difficulties in operating a computer where the main drive is SCSI and the other is ATA-100?
 

ArkAoss

Banned
Aug 31, 2000
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uhh yeah, cause theyu have to initialize their bios's individually. . can be a pain.. at work we have a server with an onboard ide cdrom, a manufacturer scsi raid, plus anouther scsi, it takes about 3 mins to get thru bios. .
 

Dug

Diamond Member
Jun 6, 2000
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Yes it will increase your boot times because of the bios. But you use scsi for speed and multitasking which outway the boot times. If your rebooting all day for some reason then go all IDE. There are no problems with running scsi hd and ide drives in the same system. If you do go scsi I understand the Tekram cards boot faster than the Adaptec.
 

shabby

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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For some reason it takes win98 like a minute to detect my scsi drives, win2k does it in like 20 secs.
 

Vinny N

Platinum Member
Feb 13, 2000
2,277
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Shabby here are some observations on that phenomena...

I've noticed that if you don't have any IDE drives, Win 2k doesn't act like it's loading some sort of driver for SCSI (you'll see your cd-rom drives,assuming they're scsi, reinitialize).

98 however...if at the time it's installed, the IDE controllers are enabled, even with no drives, it does the driver load scenario (you'll see your cd-rom drives,assuming they're scsi, reinitialize)

But, if you install 98 with the ide controllers disabled, it doesn't load any sort of driver to initialize SCSI. (you'll see your cd-rom drives, assuming they're scsi, initialize only during the scsi device detection sequence in your SCSI bios)

I don't know what happens at this point should you reenable the ide controllers in the bios, I'm not about to try for the sake of curiousity :)
 

Hard_Boiled

Golden Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Adding my SCSI card increased the boot time by less than 15 seconds. Maybe it would take alot longer with a RAID card and multiple drives, but I've never had any experience with that. Whatever time is added to the bootup is made up for when the SCSI blazes thru the Windows loading.
 

Radboy

Golden Member
Oct 11, 1999
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Any card w/ a bios will take longer to boot. Some SCSI cards take longer than others. I disable (in SCSI bios) the IDs of all devices I'm not using, so the card doesn't check for those. Shaves a few secs. My SCSI card takes ~10 secs extra (Tekram DC390-U2W) .. I've never found myself thinking it's taking an unduly long time.
 

BurnItDwn

Lifer
Oct 10, 1999
26,276
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It takes me about 10 to 15 seconds longer to boot with 3 scsi devices ... its no big deal seeing as though i reboot no more then once every few days