tlug: Some hardware questions...

[Neil Booth <NeilB@example.com>]

... from someone who knows very little about hardware. Lots of
questions, please bear with me.

SCSI
----

What is SCSI exactly and how does it work?
Why is it considered better than IDE?
What's the difference between SCSI II, Wide and UltraWide?

If you can point me to somewhere where this is covered in detail, please
do.

Zip Drive
---------

I have an Ultrawide-SCSI Adaptec card. I almost bought an Iomega Zip
Drive today, before noticing it said it was SCSI II.
Do I need some kind of adpater to slot it in?
Does a zip drive use an internal or external power source?
Are drivers necessary? If so, is there one with Redhat Linux 5.1? If
not, how can a Zip drive work without a driver (or even a hard drive,
for that matter)?

Modems
------

I want to buy a 64K modem, but the RedHat compatibility list is not very
helpful, mainly listing those that don't work, and things like "modems
that require software drivers for compression, error detection etc",
"PCI memory mapped modems" are not supported. I have no idea whether a
given modem suffers from these problems by looking at the box.
I saw an Aiwa CHP 9500 today (or something like that) that looked OK. Is
this OK? Can anyone tell me any modems that positively work under Linux? 



Answers to any or all greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Neil.
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