[SunHELP] IDE RAID?

[Jan Johansson]

On Fri, Nov 30, 2001 at 01:36:53PM -0600, Bill Bradford wrote:
>I have a need of some sort of hardware RAID to replace a
>dual-disk Solstice setup on a machine at OnRamp (who hosts
>sunhelp.org).
>
>First - anybody had experience with IDE-to-SCSI RAID setups?  If
>so, recommendations?
>
>Second - anybody got any sort of external hardware RAID setup
>(with at least 9G) that they'll sell cheap?  Needs to hook to
>the SCSI port on the back of an Ultra 2. 8-)

We are running 3 Zero-D 460 and 1 Zero-D 400, we have had some
real problems with the 460's (data loss) and the response from
the vendor has not been the best. This has been fixed since about
a month ago and they are now running very nicely.

The problems that have been solved where bad IBM DTL drives
(changed for Seagate drives), putting AFS vice partitions on
logging UFS (our fault the only that lead to data loss), firmware
upgrade so that the RAiD can handle the T1 SCSi controller (the
controller was too fast for the RAiD) and finaly a electric
backplane issue

My former work place bought two Zero-D 400, 12 IBM drives where
cycled and one RAiD was dead on arrival. Support response back
then was very fast we had a new RAiD in two days.

Many sites around us are also running Zero-D, they have had no or
little problem but the difference in config seems to be that we
do not run ours with a hotspare drive, the backplane problem was
only visible when running all six drives.

Although our problems I would recommend Zero-D because of the
amount of storage one gets for the money, but plug in the serial
console and keep an eye on it as you you run low level tests on
the RAiD before putting it in production.

Tests performed by as where, init the RAiD, swap drives randomly
and init again, use Solaris format to analyze -> verify and
finaly newfs (we actually had problems that did not show until
newfs).