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PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition
book

PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition

by Robert Bruce Thompson, Barbara Fritchman Thompson
June 2002
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
816 pages
32h 59m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Our Picks

Here are the IDE and SCSI host adapters we recommend.

IDE host adapter

Promise Technology. An add-on IDE adapter is needed to upgrade systems with older motherboards or in which an embedded ATA adapter has failed. For example, we use a recent Promise ATA adapter to test ATA-100 and ATA-133 hard drives in one of our test-bed systems that supports only ATA-33 natively. Promise makes a variety of add-on IDE host adapters, one of which should suit your requirements. (http://www.promise.com)

IDE RAID host adapter

Promise Technology FastTrak series. RAID has historically been limited to SCSI servers or high-end workstations, but the Promise FastTrak adapters make RAID affordable by using inexpensive IDE drives. FastTrak adapters are available for various UDMA levels, with two or four interfaces, and with support for varying RAID levels.

SCSI host adapter

Adaptec. For SCSI host adapters, we recommend Adaptec exclusively. Adaptec makes many models, from inexpensive models intended to support Zip drives and scanners to mainstream models for high-performance desktop systems, to high-end models for workstations and servers. We’ve used many of those variants, and have always been satisfied with their performance, reliability, and compatibility. Adaptec SCSI host adapters are universally supported, and we never have problems with them. Every time we’ve been tempted to pay a bit less for another brand, we’ve later regretted that false economy. If you install SCSI in a system, use ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596003536Catalog PageErrata