# FreeBSD converts Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 into Ultra40  why?



## Chris_H (Jan 16, 2014)

Greetings all.

I'm working with an old TYAN Thunder LE-T S2518, I dusted off to turn into a Ppointyhat/Tinderbox for building up installs for various ARCH's I work with, as well as to build updates for them. It's an old 2 CPU MB, with whopping 800Mhz CPU's on it. But it's been a great workhorse, and is well suited for "set it, and forget it" type operations such as these. My problem is, is it has Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 SCSI (2 ports). This is an Ultra III. I have many Ultra SCSI drives, that'll work with this. But the problem is, that I hooked up an IBM DNES-318350W SA30 drive to install FreeBSD to. The Adaptec (rightly) proclaims it as an 80MBs/sec drive (LVD/SE). But FreeBSD down(revs|grades) it to a 40MBs/sec drive. Why?

I've attached output from messages (effectively dmesg()), as it's from a VERBOSE boot.

Thank you for all your time, and consideration.

--Chris


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## Terry_Kennedy (Jan 18, 2014)

*Re: FreeBSD converts Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 into Ultra40  *



			
				Chris_H said:
			
		

> But the problem is, that I hooked up an IBM DNES-318350W SA30 drive to install FreeBSD to. The Adaptec (rightly) proclaims it as an 80MBs/sec drive (LVD/SE). But FreeBSD down(revs|grades) it to a 40MBs/sec drive. Why?


It is being reported correctly as a 80MB/sec drive:


```
Jan 16 12:42:51 dev kernel: da0 at ahc1 bus 0 scbus1 target 1 lun 0
Jan 16 12:42:51 dev kernel: da0: <IBM DNES-318350W SA30> Fixed Direct Access SCSI-3 device 
Jan 16 12:42:51 dev kernel: da0: Serial Number         AKL08764
Jan 16 12:42:51 dev kernel: da0: 80.000MB/s transfers (40.000MHz, offset 31, 16bit)
Jan 16 12:42:51 dev kernel: da0: Command Queueing enabled
Jan 16 12:42:51 dev kernel: da0: 17501MB (35843670 512 byte sectors: 255H 63S/T 2231C)
Jan 16 12:42:51 dev kernel: da0: Delete methods: <NONE(*)>
```
Note that it tells you that the bus clock is 40MHz, but is 16 bits wide. 40MHz * 2 bytes per transfer = 80MB/sec.



> I've attached output from messages (effectively dmesg()), as it's from a VERBOSE boot.


It isn't necessary to `tar` single text files. I almost didn't bother responding to this post because I had to download the archive, extract your text, and then look at it.


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## Chris_H (Jan 18, 2014)

*Re: FreeBSD converts Adaptec aic7899 Ultra160 into Ultra40*

Hello, @Terry_Kennedy, and thank you very much for your reply.


			
				Terry_Kennedy said:
			
		

> Chris_H said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


*D'OH!*. It would have killed me to do the math here.  Thank you for pointing out what _should_ have been obvious to me. 


			
				Terry_Kennedy said:
			
		

> > I've attached output from messages (effectively dmesg()), as it's from a VERBOSE boot.
> 
> 
> It isn't necessary to `tar` single text files. I almost didn't bother responding to this post because I had to download the archive, extract your text, and then look at it.


Thanks for pointing that out. I'll try .txt next time.
Thanks again, for taking the time (and effort) to reply.

--Chris


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