DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

How much difference does a cable make?

I assembled my new server’s disk subsystem — 2 Ultra-160 LVD SCSI drives and an Adaptec 29160 Ultra-160 LVD SCSI controller — with a nice Teflon-insulated LVD SCSI cable and active terminator that I paid $75 for a year or two ago. When I powered it up, I was disappointed to see the SCSI card’s BIOS report that the maximum negotiated speed for the chain was 40 MB/sec, just one-quarter of what I was expecting. The drives worked fine, but the speed was low.

As you might have surmised, I am completely fed up with hardware problems, so I opted for a quick, certain, but expensive fix: a new cable and terminator from Granite Digital. The packaging wasn’t much… there was not one word of documentation… but I wired them up and rebooted, and now my drives are 4x faster.

I love it when a plan comes together!