# Re: Tekram DC315U

From: John Vickers (jvickers@dial.pipex.com)
Date: Sun Sep 03 2000 - 08:51:43 PDT

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  Arcady Genkin wrote:
  >
  > Is Tekram DC315U a nice card to use with a scanner with sane? I'm
  > looking for a good value SCSI card to handle a CD-ROM, CDR/W, and a
  > scanner.

  Hi.

  I would say that it is NOT a nice card to use for anything.
  The DC390F and similar, which use NCR-based chips and have fairly
  stable drivers are safer Tekram cards.

  I ordered two a while ago; one would hang on the machines I tried it
  in, if Win or Linux drivers tried to do anything with it, the other
  was more unpleasant: the driver would hang after reading 40-100MByte.

  The 315, 315U & 395U use Tekram's own controller design, and driver
  support is much less mature (maybe the chip design also).

  The Adaptec 2903/2904 cards (PCI) are reasonably priced and have
  been reported to give good results. These are supplied with
  the Epson SCSI scanners (and probably with others), and have
  internal & external connectors (depending on model).

  I currently use an Advansys 3940UA, without problems.
  In the past, Advansys have provided good Linux driver support
  themselves. There seems to have been some sort of merger
  of Advansys with IWill - I don't know if that has changed things.

  For the record, this is what I found with the DC315U cards:

  John Vickers wrote:
  > I received two controllers, with Tekram serial numbers:
  > A924CCB0B01727 & A924CCB0B01735, which I shall call '7' and '5'.
  >
  > I tried both cards in two TX motherboards (Gigabyte ? AT , AOpen AX5T Rev3.1)
  > Under Win95OSR2.1 (both machines) & Linux Kernel 2.0.37 (AOpen only).
  >
  > Both cards were recognised by both Bios'es.
  >
  > Card '7' hung either machine under Win or Linux when drivers for the card were
  > activated, requiring the reset button to restart the machine. This was with no
  > SCSI devices attached.
  > Card '5' was a lot more annoying. Reading from a CDRW drive proved unreliable:
  > under either Win95 or Linux, the driver (not the whole machine) would hang after
  > reading typically 50-100 Megabytes from a CDROM. Tried a different SCSI CDR drive.
  > Same problem. Tried farting about with changing Target ID's, cables, external terminators
  > etc: no effect. Tried forcing an unshared interrupt in the PCI bios: no effect.
  > Tried turning CPU bus down to 55MHz. Loaded the latest versions of everything.
  > Tried swapping PCI cards arround between the two PC's. Seems that card '5' works
  > with some combinations of motherboard & PCI cards but not others: there was no single
  > PCI component it would always fail with. I guess I'd need a PCI bus analyser and a
  > very fast storage 'scope to figure it out.
  >
  > Finally got fed up & ordered an Advansys 3940UA SCSI controller, which
  > seems reliable so far...

  John.

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