"D. Stark - eSN" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> First off, any SCSI card will do, though some won't do well with hot swap.
> Look into each one seprately and make your decision.
> 
> Second, under linux, Mylex cards are the BOMB. They've had some availability
> issues lately though

I'm slightly confused - does this mean you think they are great or terrible?

> probably go Mylex with any new machines and when the time is right to

Lets see, Mylex is what used to be BusLogic?  Or was that Future Domain... hmm

> We use software RAID here in our shop on a good number of machines, as well.

Thanks Mr D for such a great description of your setup - I've filed it in my
'expert' file for future reference.

I'm afraid my description won't be nearly as good...

I've set up software raid with scsi myself (but not done much stress testing).

I used 2 adaptec (I think) controllers and 3 IBM 10krpm drives.  In hindsight
I should have done it different, which I will explain below.

What I did was put 2 drives on one controller, one drive on the other
controller, and use raid 5 (um - lets see - the raid where you have one
'parity' sector, striped across different drives, giving you 66% of the
disk space you thought you had instead of 50% like pure mirroring does).

If you are using mirroring, 'lots' of 'little' (for some value of 'little' and
'lots'!) partitions sounds like a good plan for multiple reasons - not the least
of which is that you could use more than 2 drives and spread the load all
around - giving you more performance and, as suggested by D, less risk of
loss.

A coupld of things to keep in mind when comparing SCSI and IDE:

        you can easily run more than 2 scsi busses (just add more cards)
        SCSI drives have the ability to disconnect from the scsi bus and
                go off and do stuff, like seek and read, so you can have
                (on a REAL OS like we use!) all your drives active at the
                same time - instead of only 1 per IDE channel.

There's probably more that I've forgotten, but I've sat on thie email for
a day and figured I'd better get it off so we can get on to other things ;-)

rc


Rusty Carruth          Email:     [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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