How useful would an Adaptec 2940UW be?

[Viper GTS]

I will be running at least a P3 933 here in a few days, & I've expressed interest in an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card. But... I'm wondering, how useful will that be? Will that run current drives? For example, I'd like to get a Seagate Cheetah 10K RPM 18 gig (Maybe an X15, they're not as expensive as I thought...), but it's listed as SCSI-3 LVD. Will it even work? Or will it just be slower than it could be with a newer controller? Is it even worth spending the $80 on, or would I better off just picking up a $200 Ultra160 controller from the guy on here that's selling them?

Any input would be appreciated, since I really don't know much about SCSI.

Viper GTS

 

[Oak]

Hey Viper, check my thread from a couple of days ago... same ?. Im looking for the same input, maybe youll get more than I did! Ill be watching this thread as Im in the same boat...

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=198163

 

[Coki]

I'm selling one. NEW.OEM. $70

Sorry if this is off-topic.

 

[HaVoC]

Sorry COKI, you shouldn't post for sale ads in this forum. Stick to emailing the Viper or go to FS/FT.

You will be able to use the SCSI-3 drive with the UW, but it will default down to the fastest speed of the adapter, which is 40MB/sec. You might not lose much real world performance, but burst transfers will definitely be slower. As long as the cabling is physically the same (68-pin for Wide SCSI) you will be o.k. as the hardware will adapt to host bus settings.

 

[Redneck]

First of all, I'm not a SCSI expert but I know a little. I dont think the 2940UW would be the best card to run newer HD's because it only supports ultra wide which is 40mbs comapred to Ultra 2 Wide's 80 mb/s or Ultra 160's 160mb/s (kinda obvious aint it ). IMO either go with a U/160 controller or at least a U2W. Tekram has some nice cards for the money at their online store.

edit- touched up the grammar a bit

 

[Vinny N]

A lot of LVD drives will operate in SE mode if that's all the controller supports. As others have said, the 2940UW has 40mbyte/s of bandwdith. A single one of those 10k rpm drives would max it out.

If you had such a controller already and wanted to try a single SCSI drive, it'd run okay

However, if you're looking to have more than one drive, and don't currently have a controller, it makes the most sense to pick up a nice Ultra160 controller for more headroom for a faster drive in the future (maybe we'll have single drives that push 80 or 160mbyte/s sustained), or simply more drives(i.e. Four 10k rpm drives that each use 40mbyte/s sustained).