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Comment by codesnik | Hacker News Reader

very much not on topic, but that reminded me: my first PC (286) miraculously had a 40MB 2.5" Apple-branded HDD connected via SCSI adapter. Who knows where it was sourced from. One weird thing was that it initialized on boot for about 40 seconds, displaying nothing. I've been really surprised later seeing how fast other PCs with ATA drives were to boot. I still wonder, and maybe someone has a clue why init was so long? Is it something inherent to SCSI?

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Nothing to do with SCSI itself, possibly a long time out polling for devices. Some dumb firmware would do silly things like poll each possible target ID and wait for a timeout in series. 6 possible devices on an old early SPI bus times a 5 seconds each is getting you in the neighborhood.

Having flashbacks to troubleshooting bus termination on DEC equipment.

For contrast, I had an Amiga with a 120MB Maxtor SCSI drive, and power-on to looking at the loaded Workbench GUI was about 6-7 seconds. The slowest part was waiting for the drive to spin up, which seems like an acceptable reason for a delay. Warm reboots were a few seconds faster.

So no, that's not anything inherent to SCSI. It could've been either the SCSI driver being slow to initialize, or the adapter being glacial, or the drive itself taking forever to come online.

It depends on the scsi driver; it’s possible that it was checking/enumerating the 6 possible SCSI ids and waiting 5 seconds each.

Neat! Well, SCSI is more complicated (than IDE of the times) and the drives themselves are smarter, but that still seems like a long time.

I've been 10-11 at the time, and half the games I had didn't have an obvious "quit" menu option. I hated pressing the hardware "reset" button because it meant waiting for a minute again, staring at the BIOS setup screen.

Every time I figured out a weird hidden keyboard combination to exit from yet another game was a happy day.

How well did you terminate the scsi chain?

A lot of SCSI devices can be jumpered to self-terminate.

I was a kid without any PC anywhere in 40miles around me, had no idea that SCSI had to be terminated or anything. I don't remember any jumpers on the drive, though.

Surely you mean 3.5"?

nope. it was in a 3.5" bay in my standard AT box, but it was smaller, on some massive rusty metal adapter. It looks like it was from some early apple powerbook.

I've got my computer second hand from some rural school accounting department in south of Russia, circa 1994. Who knows how it got there. And who got and wired SCSI adapter compatible with ISA bus in that box.

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