Friday, April 3, 2009

LSI Logic 53C1010 SCSI controller vs Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R motherboard

I have used SCSI controllers on almost all the many computers I have built since I was 15 years old. I have a couple that I have been using since 2001 - an eternity in computer times - which are based on the LSI Logic 53C1010 chipset.


When I did a major computer upgrade in 2007, I chose a Gigabyte GA-P35-DSR3 motherboard.

The LSI SCSI card worked OK with it, with one exception : the SCSI BIOS always searched for all 30 SCSI targets, 15 on the LVD bus (Ultra 160) and 15 on the regular wide SCSI bus (40 MB/s). It seemed to ignore the SCSI BIOS settings that I had set, telling it to only search for the SCSI targets that I actually have. This annoying problem increases the machine's boot time by about 20 seconds. There are 3 other disk controllers in the system - one Intel ICH9R SATA controller on the motherboard, one Gigabyte SATA controller also on the motherboard, and finally one VIA IDE/SATA controller on a multifunction PCI card. That's a lot of BIOS storage target scans to go through before the computer can even start booting the operating system from a hard disk or other device. It's a little bit over a minute's worth of BIOS time. Unfortunately, too many programs still require reboots after installation or uninstallation, or I would seldom reboot the computer - I normally use ACPI S3 sleep/resume feature which works great.

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