All of Adaptec's Novell NetWare drivers have full support for standard SCSI disk drives, "NetWare Ready" drives, and removable media disk drives (including optical drives).

• For Novell NetWare patches and other latest information, reference the Novell website .
• The AIC7870.DSK driver also contains a built-in ASPI manager. This allows for other Novell NetWare Loadable Modules (NLMs) to gain access to the host adapter. Given the flexibility of ASPI, several companies are currently providing server-based tape backup solutions through ASPI. SBackup is a server based tape backup solution which is shipped by Novell with NetWare. SBackup supports the ASPI interface. There are other ASPI modules already developed or under development. A programming specification is available from Adaptec if you are interested in writing your own Novell NetWare 386 ASPI module.
• The AIC78U2.HAM driver also supports applications that use the ASPI interface to access devices on a Novell NetWare Server, through NWASPI.CDM. This CDM is not included with the current release, but can be downloaded from the Novell website .
• If your file server does a lot of IO operations and you want to try optimizing its performance, you can adjust the "max_tags=?" command line switch. This switch controls the maximum number of tagged commands outstanding at a given device. Refer to your disk-drive's documentation to determine if tagged-queuing is supported, and the maximum number of outstanding commands supported. Its default value is 16.

  		  The following are examples of how to change this feature:
  		  
  		  For all 7800 Manager Set host adapters:
  		  :load aic7870 max_tags=2
  		  
  		  For UltraSCSI or earlier only host adapters:
  		  :load aic7870 tag_disable=ffff 
  		  

  The first example shows how to use the max_tags command line option. The max_tags parameter can be set between 1 and 128. Larger values give the drives more opportunity for optimization, but take up more memory in the server.
  For several reasons, you may want to use a lower value of max_tags. For some drives, maximum performance is achieved with a max_tags less than the maximum supported by the drive. Also, some drives may not support the driver's maximumcount of 128, or may suffer starvation problems with large counts, leading to drive deactivation.
  The second example applies only to the AIC7870.DSK driver. It turns off tagged-queuing for all devices. This may be necessary for starvation-prone drives.
• The Adaptec 7800 Family Manager Set Novell NetWare driver no longer supports the slot=0 command line option. For the AIC7870.DSK driver, if no slot is mentioned on the command line, the driver is loaded for all host adapters present in the system. For the Ultra2SCSI AIC78U2.HAM driver, if no slot is mentioned on the command line, the driver prompts you for a valid slot number.