About 5 years ago I built 3 ASUS PCs: 2 P4Ts and 1 AMD K8- happy with all (blazing 1.4 and 1.6 Mhz speeds LOL). The OS was/is w2k pro. I used 6 Seagate SCISI Ultra 160 15K Cheetahs and 1 IBM 36K IDE. I used Adaptec's 39160 cards and cabling. 'Twas not a cheap build because I bought the latest (Rambus, ugh!) and fastest parts - just like I'm doing now in a new build (can't really be called an upgrade). I have to build a 64 bit XP Pro video capturing PC based DVR system to accomplish a video surveillance project. Problemo: XP Pro does not, and will not provide drivers to support my 6 Ultra 160 Cheetahs and Adaptec 39160 cards. Darnmn them! (Is there a conspiracy between XP and Adaptect here? The XP Pro will driver support Adaptec's new 39320 cards (of course) - which support both Ultra 160s and their new Ultra 320s. I believe I could use the same Ultra 160 cabling for the XP driver supported Ultra 39320 cards- should I decide to shell out about $400 a piece for the new Adaptec 39320 cards. Am I correct in this assumption?? Because of new faster (150Mbs) and oh so bigger ard drives (10K 74Gb WDs), it might be advisable to say goodbye to the kittens and tell Adaptec to shove their 39320/39160 cards where the sun doesn't shine and forget about SCSI and get the new 150Mbs drives. It would seem to, at a glance, be a lot easier to plop the new WDs into my new ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe mobos in a new case. On the other hand, in the old nice shiny tall wonderfully air-cooled aluminum case sits 3 nicely cable kittens - and all I would have to do is plop out the 39160 and plop in the new $400 39320 and drive my self nuts configuring the card from the w2k pro to the XP OS, the new plopped in/out Mobo's, video cards, RAM etc. Is there a solution to the non-XP driver supported Ultra 160s to work around having to purchase the $400 39320 cards (assuming that would work ((would it work?))?
You could try and see about using the Windows 2000 drivers. XP Pro/Home is basically Win2k with a prettier GUI, and based on past experience with this, that might be something you can get to. AFAIK, Microsoft may not be able to provide a generic driver in Windows if they can't get the source code from Adaptec. If not, you might find better performance and support with cards from Tekram and LSI.
