OASYS PCI and PCI SCSI Cards
OASYS PCI Website
Contents
General information on PCI SCSI cards
Beige G3 with factory-installed ATTO SCSI card (MacOS)
See also:
PCI card interaction for MacOS and Windows
General information on PCI SCSI cards
PCI SCSI cards can provide greatly increased disk performance, resulting in increased numbers of playback and record tracks in digital audio software.
However, there is a catch: even though the bandwidth of the PCI bus is quite high, there are still limits on the amounts of data which can be transferred. Cards which transfer large amounts of data - such as SCSI cards and video accelerators - may need to be scaled back if several cards are sharing the bus.
If there is not enough available bandwidth on the PCI bus, the OASYS PCI will not function properly. This can cause clicks and pops in the audio.
The manufacturers of PCI SCSI cards, and other bus-mastering cards such as video accelerators, are aware of this issue, and generally allow the user to manage the amount of bandwidth consumed by the cards.
Use separate PCI bus on 6-slot CPUs (MacOS)
On MacOS systems with two PCI buses (all 6-slot towers, including 9500, 9600, and PowerTower Pro), we recommend placing the OASYS PCI and the SCSI card on separate PCI buses, so that each has the maximum PCI bandwidth available.
Adaptec 2940
Korg has successfully used systems combining the OASYS PCI, the Adaptec 2940 PCI SCSI card, and ultra-wide SCSI drives.
Adaptec includes software for configuring the 2940, named PowerDomain. This software allows the user to configure various aspects of the card. We recommend setting the PCI behavior to "Cache Line." The actual menu/window in which this is done varies depending upon the version of the Adaptec software being used; see the Adaptec documentation for details.
In some cases, it may also help to reduce the SCSI transfer rate to 10MB/sec., although generally this does not appear to be necessary. See the Adaptec documentation for details on setting the transfer rate.
Beige G3 with factory-installed
ATTO SCSI card (MacOS)
Some Beige G3 Macintosh models were bundled with the ATTO Express PCI SCSI card. Korg recommends setting the card's transfer rate to 10 MB/sec, using ATTO's ExpressPro-Tools program. This program is not included in the box, but may be downloaded from ATTO's website, at http://www.attotech.com/software/.
Copyright 1999-2002 Korg Inc. FAQ Version: 8/19/02