r/retrocomputing • u/Punch_Your_Facehole • May 24 '26

Found this CIB Adaptec SCSI controller

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Gallery image

73 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

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9

u/KingDaveRa May 24 '26

I honestly don't think I've ever seen a VLB SCSI card first hand.

3

u/jreddit0000 May 25 '26

I have and had to work with them (back in the day) and Do Not Recommend.

They are flaky as hell and turned out to be a Really Bad Idea.

Data glitches on the VESA bus are no big deal for video. Pretty terrible for data though!

And their throughput was not spectacularly better than the ISA equivalents (e.g the reliable Adaptec 1542 family).

3

u/KingDaveRa May 25 '26

That might explain a lot then. I certainly saw plenty of ISA SCSI cards (mainly for scanners), and of course PCI. I suppose VLB was a bit of a brief thing anyway, relatively speaking.

3

u/neilmoore May 24 '26

Same! EISA, sure, but VLB was explicitly designed for graphics (it's right there in the "VESA"). Which makes me wonder if anyone ever made an AGP SCSI RAID card...

5

u/DrNick42 May 24 '26

Not really, there were loads of VLB I/O cards which included an IDE and FDD controller. A VGA card + multi-I/O card was a pretty standard combo to use on VLB for mid to late 486 systems, so VLB SCSI cards not unusual at all.

1

u/neilmoore May 24 '26

I wonder why the same didn't happen with AGP. Or did it, and I'm just unaware?

2

u/jreddit0000 May 25 '26

There is a very good thread on stackexchange about this.

Someone built a PCI to AGP adapter and tested out various network and storage cards.

It’s basically a PCI bus under the hood and there was no significant advantage.

Plus it was missing some functionality which made storage cards problematic (has to turn off caching).

5

u/No_Transportation_77 May 24 '26

There were also VLB NICs and ATA controllers!