Drive Controllers and Connectors

The system board supports several controllers and connectors for the control of the various drives that are or can be installed in the system.

SCSI Connectors

The system board includes two SCSI controllers. A narrow SCSI controller (SYM53C810AE) is on the PCI-A bus, and a dual-channel wide LVD/SE (Ultra2/Ultra) SCSI controller (SYM53C896) is on the PCI-B bus. The narrow controller provides support for legacy 8-bit SCSI devices that may be installed in the 5.25-inch drive bays. The wide controller drives one SCSI backplane and provides support for external expansion.

Each controller has its own set of PCI configuration registers and SCSI I/O registers. As a PCI 2.1 bus master, the wide controller supports burst data transfers on PCI up to the maximum rate of 132 MB/sec using on-chip buffers.

No logic, termination, or resistor loads are required to connect devices to the SCSI controller other than termination in the device at the end of the cable. The SCSI bus is terminated on the system board with active terminators that can be disabled.

Wide SCSI A (LL) and Wide SCSI B Connectors (A)

Internally, each wide channel is identical, capable of operations using either 8- or 16-bit SCSI providing 10 MB/sec (Fast-10) or 20 MB/sec (Fast-20) throughput, or 20 MB/sec (Ultra) or 40 MB/sec (Ultra-wide).

The wide controller contains a high-performance SCSI bus interface. It supports SE mode with 8-bit (10 or 20 MB/sec) or 16-bit (20 or 40 MB/sec) transfers and LVD mode with 8-bit (40 MB/sec) or 16-bit (80 MB/sec) transfers.

Narrow SCSI Connector (II)

The narrow controller contains a high-performance SCSI core capable of Fast 8-bit SCSI transfers in single-ended mode. It provides programmable active negation, PCI zero wait-state bursts of faster than 110 MB/sec at 33 MHz, and SCSI transfer rates from 5 to 10 MB/sec.

12 Maintaining and Troubleshooting the Gateway ALR 9200 Server