Review of Trantor 358 Parallet to SCSI adapter

[timn@ion.apana.org.au (Tim Noonan)]

This review is very rough.  If you want any further info please
contact me at 
timn@ion.apana.org.au

This is a very rough review of the Trantor 358 Parallel to SCSI adapter
used on the ThinkPad 750 (mono) machine.


All the following comments relate to use of the Trantor 358 with an IBM
ThinkPad 750 (mono).

This cable supports the EPP (Enhanced Parallel Port specification and
claims a transfer rate of up to one Megabyte a second.

Regular parallel ports with the Trantor 348 achieve about 250-300 K a
second.

Note that there are now comms cards in ISA and VESA varieties which
contain an EPP parallel port FIFO'd uarts and regular and Fast IDE
controllers.

This Trantor 358 cable is only better than the less expensive Trantor
348 cable if you have an EPP parallel port (the ThinkPad 750 series
machines all do.

If you are going to use a Tripple speed CDROM drive, a SCSI hard disk or
a scanner then the extra speed is very much worth it.  If you only plan
using a single or double spin CDROM drive or a Floptical drive or a tape
drive then probably the extra cost will be on the whole wasted.

The product is reasonably well documented, and consists of the Trantor
cable (inc. a parallel pass through socket) the manual, Two disks, and a
shielded parallel centronics cable.

The software is all ASPI based for DOS and therefore can support quite a
wide range of devices.  Drivers for Photo CD and older CD-ROM drives are
provided, as are drivers for the HP II series scanners (though i haven't
tried the HP Scanjet iiCX specifically. The iip and iic both work well.

I haven't tried it under OS/2 but there is an OS/2 and winnt directory
on the drivers disk.

Tape back-up software is provided.  I have not tried this.

Floptical drives and many hard disks are also supported.

Basic installation didn't work properly.  I kept getting a hang, during
booting on the search for the scanner.

This was not a problem at slow speed, but with the ps2 speed fast
setting I experienced this problem on most occasions.

I tried different Parallel port settings etc, but ended up staying with
LPT2 as recommended in the FAQ.

Finally I moved the ma358 and the scanner and CDROM drivers to the end
of the config.sys - this solved all my problems perfectly.

Scanner through-put from the HP iiC seems very good.

I successfully used the ASPITar (/diskutl/aspibin.zip) program to access
my WangDat 3200 DAT drive to backup my hard disk over the Trantor
adaptor.  This software is available from the simtel archive.  Note that
tar files with file names longer than 8.3 can make extractions fail with
this port.  This is a patched version of GNU tar and  uses the ASPI
driver installed for the Trantor 358 device.

I had no difficulties accessing my Toshiba 3401 CD-ROM drive either.

All-in-all I am very happy with the device, however if the SCSI port on
a device was very close to the desk top then there is a chance of the
plug on the cable being too close the the desk and not letting the
device lie flat on the table-top.  This is because of the way the cable
exits from the SCSI end of the Trantor cable.

The cable has a 25 pin Centronics plug for the PC and a 50 Pin large
Centronics style connector for the SCSI device.  A 25 pin female socket
also extends from the SCSI end of the cable to add your printer or other
parallel device.

I did have some initial problems with concurrent parallel device and
SCSI operation but don't know if this was a configuration issue.  I
haven't had time to thoroughly sort this problem out or to read the docs
properly.

The cable isn't overly long, probably about 2 thirds of a meter (two
feet) which isn't really long enough.

Oh yes, I very occasionally got errors initializing the scanner from my
DOS based OCR software or from windows applications.  Re-trying seemed
to fix this second time round.  This problem did not seem to cause any
other conflicts.  I suspend that it is a send not a receive problem that
is affected by the CPU speed of the Thinkpad.

No specific drivers are available for Windows from what I can tell,
however running windows after booting with the drivers loaded appears to
give full access to all the SCSI facilities.

The ASPI scanner driver looks identical to the card-based scanner
drivers HP provided but works over the Trantor adaptor instead of the
SCSI card shipped with the HP scanners.