Hi Duncs,

In message <97Jan10.141042gmt.36871@oswald.worc.ac.uk>
          "Duncan Ferguson" <d.ferguson@worc.ac.uk> wrote:

> Any suggestions on what SCSI card to use, or 9 gig disks?
> 
> May as well try to get this right from the start ;o)

as I've been using RiscBSD solely with a SCSI disk connected to a Cumana SCSI
II card for more than a year now, I want to comment on this.
Somehow you're in a no win situation IMHO.

I wouldn't buy anything from Cumana because they have shown a rather bad
attitude towards RiscBSD by insisting on their (nowadays ridiculous) NDA. This
keeps on bothering the kernel team (they have to treat this driver specially,
have to make a new object file available seperately whenever the source
changes) and the users of this card who compile custom kernels such as Ale and
me. We always have to treat this driver specially, can't do testing without the
source and can't compile custom kernels whenever a new object file is needed
but isn't available yet (which is the situation now, haven't had the chance to
get a custom kernel with the ibuf overflow buffer fixed for two weeks due to
various problems with the Cumana driver). You will probably also want to
compile your own kernels to tune it for your heavy needs.
This card isn't faster than the others now anyway. It's certainly unusable for
your needs unless the driver improves. Same for the other SCSI cards.
If you also think that NDAs are a bad thing (particularly here where only some
stupid addresses are under NDA, nothing more!) it would be a good idea to tell
Cumana that you won't buy their card for use under RiscBSD because of the NDA.
Maybe this will persuade them to withdraw it.

The power-tec card is no better when it comes to performance atm, but the
driver isn't under NDA. Steffen Huber used to have some good reasons against
power-tec due to problems under RISC OS, but I don't know if that has improved
by now.

I thought the Connect 32 was a good choice, at least they support RiscBSD by
providing a card and information. But as you have probably seen already, Mark
has said recently that it is unsure if this card can be used well under RiscBSD.
Maybe you can wait until that is sorted out as this card would be the best
choice otherwise IMHO.

Anyway, do you want to set this server up soon? Even the internal IDE
controller (which is the fastest atm) will hardly deliver the necessary
performance now. The Ethernet performance might also be a problem.

Hope this helps a bit,

Markus