[ On Tuesday, December 7, 1999 at 12:07:47 (-0500), Thor Lancelot Simon wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: RAID followup...
>
> On Tue, Dec 07, 1999 at 07:21:24AM -0600, Peter Seebach wrote:
> > So, what external RAID boxes have people specifically tried?  I'd just go
> > and pick one, but I know that BSD/OS has occasionally gotten burned by "very
> > close to SCSI" implementations...

Indeed!  I had enormous problems with one model of Adaptec's
SCSI-to-SCSI controllers, even with FreeBSD and CAM (it was somewhat
faster with FreeBSD, but still crashed under load).  It wasn't very
reliable at rebuilds after simulating a dead drive either.

> I am very fond of the CMD 5440/5500 controllers, but they're somewhat
> throughput-limited if you hook a pile of brand-new disks up to them (there
> is a U2 model, but it only does 40MB/sec because the box hasn't got enough
> oomph to do 80).  There's a new 7240 model that I saw at Comdex that
> really looked terrific, but it may be very expensive.  Can't hurt to ask,
> though!

From what I heard, particularly amongst the FreeBSD community, the CMD
controllers were better performers than most any others in the field.

I've also some experience with the Zentra PS-Arena (www.zentra.com) RAID
controller, which is SCSI to EIDE.  They definitely won on price for the
same performance and capacity.  They've apparently since moved from an
80486DX2 CPU to an i960 on that model....

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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