[ On , October 28, 1998 at 11:28:05 (-0700), Chris Jones wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: RAID Question,
>
> We've got an Adaptec AEC-4412B here.  We just received it, so I
> haven't had much chance to play with it, but it appears to be a really
> nice piece of equipment.  It's not a RAID controller card; it's an
> external device, with three SCSI interfaces:  one for the host and two
> for disks.  It's configurable via buttons on the front panel or by a
> serial cable that speaks VT100.  It'll do RAID 0, 1, 0/1, 5, and
> either 3 or 4; I don't remember which.  I think we paid about $1800
> for it.

What's the difference between a 4412B and a 4312A?  Ultra & Wide Ultra?

Anyway, one of my FreeBSD using clients bought an integrated RAID box
(from Trimm) which had a 4312A in it.  It seemed to work fine, though
had some serious limitations when it came to handling hot-spare disks
and automatic rebuilds.  Pulling a live drive out of the box would cause
it to die and be unrecoverable.  Even trying to mark a drive as offline
and then "hot"-swapping it wasn't reliable.

However under load under FreeBSD 2.2.7 it failed miserably.  Two
simultaneous cvs checkouts of the source tree would cause it either to
generate zillions of errors, or to go catatonic.  I didn't have time to
try integrating the SCSI CAM sub-system into my client's internal 2.2.7
release to re-test it and see if it was just a driver problem, or not
though....

I did note that it's SCSI interface was a bit "lax".  It didn't report
all the required parameters in various mode pages, for example.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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