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README
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1991-11-18
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UltraStor Corporation
The ULTRA 24F is a high performance EISA to SCSI host adapter supporting up to
7 SCSI devices (or up to 56 devices if a SCSI bridge controller is used).
The host adapter is designed to support a variety of SCSI devices such as
Hard disk, Tape, CDROM, DAT, WORM, MO rewritable disk, Scanner, Laser
printer, etc.. A high speed 32 bit micro-processor provides the local
intelligence for host adapter command processing.
The intelligent host adapter features bus mastering 33 MB/sec data transfers,
low overhead SCSI command processing, command queuing, multi-threaded
operation, scatter/gather, EISA auto-configuration and disk defect management.
The ULTRA 24F utilizes the industry standard Intel BMIC chip to maintain
compatibility while communicating with the motherboard and other expansion
cards. The data transfer is up to 33 MByte/sec on the EISA bus using the bus master mode/burst transfer method.
The ULTRA 24F host adapter conforms to the industry standard SCSI-1 and SCSI-2
specification. It automatically negotiates for fast, synchronous and/or asyn-
chronous data transfers without host/user intervention. SCSI features such as
disconnect/reselect, command linking, and command queuing are implemented to
full advantage of a multitasking environments.
The on-board BIOS allows OS drivers to interface efficiently to the controller
and also provides users the ease of installing SCSI drives to the system.
In order to achieve the full advantage from the high speed EISA interface
while maintaining the downward compatibility with the current ISA disk BIOS
and disk device driver, the ULTRA 24F provides dual sets of interface protocol
on the host side, ISA mode and EISA mode.
The ISA mode is the industry standard (WD1003 compatible) task file register
interface, which provides compatibilty with most currently available operating
system disk device drivers. It uses the Task File Register command interface
and 16 bits PIO data transfer. The industry standard task file registers
(TFR) and full ISA disk command set are implemented for the current ISA
protocol. On the EISA side, a multi-thread, Mail-Box type, 32 bit Bus Master
protocol is implemented to reduce system CPU intervention and data/command
transaction overhead.
The ISA mode can be disabled through the configuration utility.
The ISA mode is enabled only if the operating system disk device driver is not
currently available from UltraStor (such as Banyan Vines) or the initial in-
stallation of certain operating systems need to go through the ISA mode (such
as UNIX).
Under the EISA mode operation, the controller will operate with Bus
Master/burst data transfer rate up to 33 Mbyte per second and up to 20 Mbyte
per second sustained data transfer rate. Due to its well designed command
protocol, unlike the ISA mode, the system CPU is free most of the time to do
other tasks while the controller's local CPU does all the command processing,
SCSI device accessing and data transfer operation. It interrupts the system
CPU only when the command is completed or when an error has occurred. The
benefit of the EISA mode operation can be summarized as:
1. Due to the high burst data transfer rate and sustained data transfer
rates, the ULTRA 24F reduces the bandwidth utilization of the EISA Bus,
freeing up the bus for other Bus Masters in the system. This means the
system is able to maintain the same performance level even under heavy bus
activity.
2. Since the system CPU's involvement in the SCSI device operation is mini-
mized to only sending command packets through a set of contiguous inter-
face registers and waiting for command complete interrupt to check the
resulting status, the CPU is free most of the time to execute other tasks.
This increases the system's overall performance especially in a multi-
tasking, multi-processing operating environment.
Software Package
Included in the software package that comes with the ULTRA 24F are:
1. ULTRA 24F EISA SCSI Host Adapter
Utilities & Device Drivers (DOS/OS2/NETWARE)
README : This readme file.
!USC0240.CFG : ULTRA 24F configuration file.
To be used when ULTRA 24F is
installed in an EISA system
\DOS\USPI.SYS : DOS device driver for supporting
ASPI compatible device module
interface
\OS2\DISK01.SYS : OS/2 Device Driver for supporting
ASPI compatible SCSI device manager
\NETWARE\U24_31x.DSK : NOVELL device driver for
supporting ASPI compatible SCSI
device manager
\NETWARE\ASPITRAN.DSK : NOVELL NetWare 386 ASPI host adapter
administration manager
2. ULTRA 24F EISA MSCSI Device Driver
For SCO UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2
\3.2.0 : Device Driver and install script
for Release 3.2.0
\3.2.2 : Device Driver and install script
for Release 3.2 v 2.0
\MPX.100 : Device driver and install script
for MPX release 1.0.0
\MPX.110 : Device driver and install script
for MPX release 1.1.0
3. ULTRA 24F SCSI Disk Device Driver
For AT&T UNIX System V/386 Release 3.2
For Primary Host Adapter
: Device Driver and install script
for Release 3.2