ATTO Silicon Express II Nubus

lobust

Tinkerer
Nov 14, 2021
51
34
18
I recently bought one of these to try out - google turns up almost nothing about this card, so I thought I'd document what I've learned about it.

1. It is bootable, at least on a Quadra 650/800, haven't tried any others yet. It will not find a bootable disk on it's own, but if you boot by some other means and use the Startup Disk control panel to select a disk connected to the SEII it will happily boot from that disk thereafter. It does this without any special drivers on either boot volume, at least on the disks I used.

2. It uses the same control panel and additional software as the Silicon Express IV, downloadable from the garden / repository, although this doesn't appear to be needed for basic functionality

3. It is a little over twice as fast as the onboard SCSI. SCSI Director 4.0 performance test with a SCSI2SD v6. shows peak R/W at 5811/4317 K/sec respectively, as opposed to 2838/1760 K/sec when connected to onboard SCSI.

If anyone has a manual or any reference material for the SEII specifically I would love to see it, as it seems only the SEIV manual exists online.
 

lobust

Tinkerer
Nov 14, 2021
51
34
18
4. It appears to be incompatible with PDS cache cards, or specifically the Daystar FastCache Quadra, and the option to enable the FastCache is grayed out in the QuadControl CDEV when the SEII is installed.