On Wed, 27 Jun 2001 at 11:40am, Tom Strickland wrote
> In my previous post I mentioned that we're looking to get an HP
> Surestore. The suppliers said that nothing less a rather expensive
> Adaptec card would do. If we need to buy an expensive Ultra-Wide card,
Did they mention why? Did their testing demonstrate that the drives
*won't* work with other cards, or that they *will* work on the Adaptec
card?
> we will. I would have thought that it was overkill for the speed that
> such a drive can manage? Am I missing something? Are the lower priced
> cards of such inferior quality that it would be a mistake to buy them?
Well, I've got a 560GB IDE-SCSI RAID hanging off of a "cheap" Initio based
U2W (LVD) SCSI card (a100u2w driver), and I can get 30+MB/s reading and
writing to the RAID 5. I've actually had (knock on wood) more trouble
with the Adaptec controllers integrated on the motherboard of the
server than with that controller. The RAID supplier actually suggested
that card over an Adaptec solution.
Unless they can give you real good reasons backed up by testing, I'd be
tempted to ignore them
OTOH, this *is* a backup solution, and you don't want to tempt the fates
too much. Your call, I'm just trying to provide a data point.
Good luck.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
