Naturally any product is susceptible to defects, either caused by shipping and handling, incorrect configuration or other mishaps during installation or was actually shipped with a defect that has gone undetected by quality control. Other products need proprietary software to be able to function or require drivers or 3rd party software installed on your system to make them work. These products are equally prone to defects due to software incompatibility, bugs or simply by using the wrong software for the product.

So one of the most important things when buying such a product is to make sure it comes with a good instruction manual and is backed by technical support, either on the web or with a phone number you can call for assistance. And naturally the Adaptec 29160 SCSI Card came with both. In addition to evaluating the workings of Adaptec's 29160 SCSI Card we've also their technical support, posing to be a new customer who can't get his 29160 working and get the SCSI IDs and other SCSI settings properly configured and up and running as they should be.

We called technical support and asked them if they could help us set up the 29160. After being put on hold for about 2-minutes we were on the phone with a technical support engineer who, with help from a ‘How-To’ guide on their website, took us through a checklist and within 10-minutes we had our 29160 up and running. Overall it took Adaptec's technical support less than 15-minutes to get us up and running.

We’ve also emailed the same question to Adaptec's technical support and they got back to us within 24-hours, with a reference to the user manual and the very same ‘How-To’ guide on their website, detailing how to properly setup the 29160 and any SCSI devices. So if you need a quick answer, we’d recommend calling technical support instead of emailing them.