HBA's was Re: [SunRescue] Excuse my gross oversimplification of RAID

[James Lockwood]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, Chris Byrne wrote:

> Doesnt it make you wish that adaptec made Solaris drivers for their high
> end PC based HBA's? I mean thy have seom pretty kick ass cards that I
> know should be able to work with Solaris but have drivers only for
> Microsquish. You know it's sad when Linux has better hardware support
> than Solaris.

The SPC/S shipped by Sun is a DPT Millennium (currently sold by Adaptec).
Adaptec will not release programming information for most of their cards.
I prefer Mylex myself for affordable RAID.

Sun isn't pushing RAID controllers at the HBA level, they're concentrating
their effort on network attached storage and intelligent arrays (A1000
etc).  I think that in the long run this strategy will pay off but they've
got a lot of people looking for a cheap short-term solution.

> As do I, but the cheapest I've seen an Ultra 30 for in reasonble shape
> with reasonable specs is about $3500, whereas I got my U10 for $1400. I
> figure a few hundred on a good SCSI card, and another few hundred on a
> good drive and I'm still ahead of the game (not by much I'll admit)

Minimally configured U30's are showing up on Ebay for under $1k.  As the
UltraSparc-III line rolls in I expect to see price drops across the board
on used equipment. 

-James