Here's Seagate's link for your drive
http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/specs/st12400n.shtml
This is a narrow SCSI (10 megabytes per second) 5400 rpm drive.
The drive supports an external transfer rate of approximately
3.2 to 5 megabytes per second, which is well within the max
specs for the narrow 50 pin SCSI channel.  You won't get any
boost in performance by spending 150.00 for an Ultra controller,
except perhaps in terms of optimized drivers for your operating
system.  You could go with the cheapest SCSI card that supports
internal devices, some of the cards have only an external connector.
I use Adaptec 1540 or Future Domain 1670, discontinued but easy
to find and they have on-board BIOS to support booting from SCSI.
You don't need to load any windows drivers for them either as support
is built into windows.  Adaptec support has dos drivers if you want them.

If you want a nice, inexpensive Ultra card, look around for a Diamond
Fireport.  Diamond discontinued the SCSI product line, I imagine they
sold the Fireport business to someone but I don't know who.  However,
the cards are really cheap, have exceptional NT and windows performance,
and I assume windows 2000 will support them as well.

If you have an existing IDE boot drive, I would not configure the SCSI as
a boot drive.  Fdisk it all as an extended partition.  If your controller is not
plug and play, and the older Adaptec and Future Domains are not,
all you need to do is configure an IRQ for the SCSI controller.
Depending on your motherboard, you may have to specify the IRQ is legacy
in your CMOS so that plug and play devices don't contend with the controller
for the IRQ.
Tom Turak
----------
From: Patrick Black
Sent: Friday, June 25, 1999 6:33 PM
I just purchased a used SCSI Harddrive. It's a Seagate ST12400N.

I'm looking for a recommendation on the best SCSI controller for this drive;
and more information on how to set up the SCSI as it will be teamed  up
with 3 other IDE devices.(1 HD Primary channel--seagate; 1 PCDVD/CDROM
Master Secondary channel;1 IDE/ATAPI Iomega Zip drive; Slave Secondary
Channel).


--Patrick Black

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