[rescue] A5000, 22x9.1GB, QLogic QLA2100F controller, asking $550

[Joshua Boyd]

On Fri, Mar 31, 2006 at 04:48:52PM -0500, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

> Can you easily get controllers for PCI, Sun and PC machines?  Are they
> expensive?

Qlogic cards are reportedly very good and are pretty cheap (I recently
bought a FC-AL array and was looking for one, until I actually got the
array in my hands and realized it was too loud for me to use at this
time).  That would likely be what I'd go for on a PC.  I've seen some
great benchmarks from these for both Irix and Linux.

For Sun machines, I've heard good reports about JNI cards, and they seem
to be a lot cheaper than Sun cards.  One is currently $65 on ebay.  I
stopped shopping for these for the same reason.  I've used a machine
with one and it is darn speedy.

Just to be clear the disks seem to be of average volume.  It's just that
the array I bought has a pair of tremendously loud blowers on it.
 
> I would like to upgrade, but the price of SCSI drives is the biggest
> worry, as the drives I want will cost more than the machine.

Sometimes there are really good deals on 181gig drives (I bought 2 for
$85 each).  The rest of the time, there are cheap stacks of 50 gig
drives and 711s for SCSI.  For awhile I was seeing killer deals on 18
and 36 gig FC-AL disks, but at the moment my feeling is that they are
about equal in price, and that higher capacity SCSI is cheaper than
higher capacity FC-AL.  

My main reason for choosing FC-AL would be because it is cheaper than
trying to put together a complete U160 system (sure U160 drives are too
bad, and U160 controllers probably aren't bad, but I've yet to see
anything resembling a cheap U160 array).   On systems that can easily
take it, I think that MB per MB SATA arrays would be cheaper and faster
than 1G fiber.  That is why I eventually want FC-AL for Solaris and
Irix, but SATA for OS X and Linux.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd
jdboyd at jdboyd.net
http://www.jdboyd.net/
http://www.joshuaboyd.org/