On Sat, Apr 17, 1999 at 01:52:18PM -0600, Chris Jones wrote:
> >>>>> "Harry" == Harry W Waddell <waddell@caravan.com> writes:
> 
> Harry> I am genuinely glad that Chris Jones had good luck with his
> Harry> devices, but we bought about ten of them, as I recall, we found
> Harry> them to be very erratic for arrays with more than a few drives
> Harry> in them. We tried pretty hard to make them work, but to no
> Harry> avail. Everyone I know who likes them has only used them for a
> Harry> small number of disks, but that's just anecdotal. Currently we
> Harry> are testing a new extrenal raid frob that we hope will be more
> Harry> promising.
> 
> Please post results when you get them.  Although, as I say, I've had
> good luck with this device (and with 12 disks attached, no less!), my
> overall impression of Adaptec is that it's been going downhill for a
> while now.  Seems like they're getting less and less cooperative
> towards the free software community, and that makes me think I should
> spend my (or my employer's) money elsewhere.

Again, I can highly recommend the CMD CRD-5440 -- it's the only hardware
RAID device I've *ever* seen that's never nailed me with a hardware or
firmware bug yet.  And performance is pretty good, too, plus you have your
choice of UI, on the front panel or by a serial port or (reputedly -- I've
never tried it) by SNMP over the serial port.  And it has one _very_ nice
feature that would have saved my ass if some other sexy RAID hardware (e.g
NetApps) had it -- you can designate "warm" spare disks, where it tells them
to spin down until they're needed, so they haven't been sitting there powered
up and spinning as long as the disks they're supposed to replace in an
emergency.

The 5500 is the 5440's big brother, with redundant internal controllers and
modular host and disk channels.  Since it only does 40Mb/sec (though it does
do LVD, just not 40MHz LVD) using more bandwidth than a 5440 can handle
(it also only has a 60MB/sec internal datapath) requires striping together
multiple LUNs on the same raidset on multiple host channels, which is kinda a
pain -- I haven't seen much need for the 5500 yet in my configurations.

Their new 7000-series RAID controlllers seem really cool, but I doubt I'll
have call to use one at one of my clients any time soon.  Worth a look for
Really Big configurations, though...

I buy these from Adjile.  Telenet also handles them, I think -- I trust both
those vendors a great deal.