On Wed, 16 Apr 1997 00:45:19 -0700 
 "Michael L. VanLoon -- HeadCandy.com" <michaelv@MindBender.serv.net> wrote:

 > Can anyone speak for the stability of the 53c810 under NetBSD 1.2.1?  I
 > know it's very well tested under FreeBSD.  Are there cheap ultra
 > and/or wide Symbios/NCR 53c8xx cards out there?  Are they supported on
 > NetBSD 1.2.1?

I don't recall if an updated NCR 53c810 driver was pulled up into 1.2.1.
The -current version is esentially the same driver as FreeBSD's, with
some portability enhancements (i.e. "run on alpha" :-)

 > Oh definitely buy more, smaller drives.  Don't bother with that 9GB
 > beast.  Get a whole bunch of 5400RPM 2GB drives, and spread them over
 > multiple SCSI busses, then stripe them with CCD.  Read Joe Greco's
 > ultimate news server recommendations on the FreeBSD lists.

...most definitely get more drives, and spread them across as many
controllers as is feasible.  In general, I try to put 4 drives or
less on a controller.  When you interleave, you want to do controller
first, then target.  For example:

	bus0	bus1	bus2
	sd0(0)	sd2(0)	sd4(0)
	sd1(1)	sd3(1)	sd5(1)

...when you configure your ccd in this case, you want to list the componets
in the following order:

	sd0 sd2 sd4 sd1 sd3 sd5

Without doing do, you won't be able to achieve maximum concurrency.

 > CCD is as stable as the rest of NetBSD.  Many people use it for the
 > main filesystems in important servers.  CCD came from NetBSD, but the
 > FreeBSD guys are making big waves with it.  Some of the biggest news
 > servers on the net are FreeBSD machines with CCD-striped drives
 > (essentially the same CCD that is in NetBSD).  These are *very*
 > disk-intensive environments.

The ccd is _very_ stable.  I've been using it for my bread-and-butter
for well over a year (and even before that, but that was before
all the work I did on it :-) ... my particular application is a source
code and build server.  The P6 where I do most of my at-work development
is always busy, source, objects, etc. on ccd volumes.

I've made a few improvements to the ccd's performance since FreeBSD
picked it up, and to my knowledge, they haven't picked up the improvements
yet.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                                Pager: 415.428.6939