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

[Chris Byrne]

James Lockwood wrote:

> How do you define "intelligent" RAID?  Battery-backed write cache?
> Onboard RAID-5 parity calculation?

I was thinking support for all of the major raid levels in hardware,
good management and monitoring tools, and a reasonable amount of cache.
I don't  really need battery backed cache since I run everything on a
UPS, and my machine isn't mission critical. 

> 
> Doesn't exist (with Solaris drivers).  If you're looking for a SCSI
> solution for the low end PCI Sparcs (32-bit) then I highly recommend the
> Symbios SYM22801 dual UW.  Driver support is excellent (it's the card Sun
> ships), the cards are reasonably priced (relative to Sun list) and it will
> be more versatile than a single U160 chain in terms of the number of
> devices you can reasonably connect.

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.

> This is one of many reasons I prefer the Ultra 30 and AXi to the 5 and 10.

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)

-- 
Chris Byrne
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The eyes may be the windows on the soul
But the word is the doorway to the mind
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