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I'm in the market for a new machine, and I've been spec'ing out different parts for my budget...These drives are nice and big, but what happens when you lose a 120 gig drive...I've pretty much decided that I'm going to have to get an IDE RAID card and highly recommend them...the RAID cards at work have saved me hours and hours of restoring from backup...Check out the 3ware Escalade, the Promise SuperTrak, or the Adaptec 2400A. RAID 5 is the way to go (with or without removable drives). I've been watching the prices for 120 Gig drives drop and now it's just about the price where I can afford to spend 150 clams to buy an extra drive that would be used to protect myself from a drive failure.

- grunby

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/markedito rial.html?sess=no&prodkey=quick_explanation_of_rai d

RAID Level 0
RAID Level 0 is not redundant, hence does not truly fit the "RAID" acronym. In Level 0, data is split across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Since no redundant information is stored, performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in all data loss. This level is commonly referred to as striping.

RAID Level 1
RAID Level 1 is commonly referred to as mirroring with 2 hard drives. It provides redundancy by duplicating all data from one drive on another drive. The performance of a Level 1 array is slightly better than a single drive, but if either drive fails, no data is lost. This is a good entry-level redundant system, since only two drives are required. However, since one drive is used to store a duplicate of the data, the cost per megabyte is high.

The following pages provide information about ATA RAID and hot swapping:

• Adaptec 2400A - FAQ

  It supports online capacity expansion, hot-spare and hot-swap (chassis required), and all major operating systems.

• 3Ware 7500-series controller - Datasheet
• 3Ware ATA Drive Cage - Product Specs
• Promise SuperTrack SX6000 - Datasheet

So you are in Europe then? My plextor 40/12/40 from North America came with EasyCD5 but honestly I can't stand that program. I want finer and more granular control as to the adherance to ISO specifications and error correction features. Plus Nero has better multisession CD features.

As I understand it, the European Plextor drives all come with Nero while the North American ones come with EasyCD.

I have had countless problems with EasyCD regarding VXD and DLL files missing or the wrong version, strange crashes, strange lockups on a variety of computers running Win9x, NT, 2k all with different hardware and software setups from EasyCD 3.5 to 5.0. I can't stand it and find that Nero is much more smooth and fast and it's never choked on me.

Still, I do not know for certain why an IE install would have killed your burning performance. You might want to go make sure your ASPI layer install is not messed up because that can really mess up your burning performance.

"And then when I got DUN fixed and went online, in 10 seconds flat I had a ding on my firewall from a M$-owned IP address (apparently IE5.5 is ET-ware, even when it's not per-se running!!) Okay, enough of this crap.. IE5.5 would not uninstall cleanly, had to forcibly remove it with IEradicator (which also got my desktop slickness back) then reinstall my well-mannered IE5.0.some-internal-build."

I know what you mean ... whenever I install IE or just set up a machine with a clean windows install, I *never* give it network access (i.e. the cat5 stays unplugged) until IE is properly locked out of certain MSFT IP's via Tiny Personal Firewall.

SCSI vs Firewire

Adaptec is very cooperative. You can find their page here. I think the aic7xxx driver in the 2.4 kernel tree was sponsored by Adaptec (i.e. they paid a guy to write it). It works very well. Here is the official page for the aic7xxx driver.

Most IDE drive trays are NOT rated for hot swap, and neither are the controllers on the motherboard. To do ide hotswap the best way is an ide raid controller from either 3ware, Promise or Adaptec along with certified disk trays.

Adaptec has a press release concerning their new Serial ATA ASIC/controller here. I'm sure many other manufacturers have similar news as well.

This is one new standard I'm willing to accept. In fact, I'm a bit surprised by the number of people here scoffing at Serial ATA. With performance of some parallel ATA drives matching mainstream SCSI drives for months now, with capacities closing in, and with SCSI manufacturers continuing to slowly drop production of SCSI optical drives, I think the end of SCSI is near. I never thought I'd say that, but I really think it is.

So to all you people saying that this just introduces a new standard to a "mess", I think you're wrong. This will end the division between desktop storage and mid-level server storage. Firewire and USB will stick around - but only as the external storage interface options they should be.

Were I used to work (An all-windows shop) we used Adaptec RAID cards in all our "tower" based servers. Even the lower priced models (AAA-131U2) always performed without a hitch and we never had any problems with them at all. AMI's RAID controllers are real nice and all, but for the price it just wasn't worth it. The Adaptec solutions performed just as well and at a lower cost. You'd do good to check em out.

Now the 3200 RAID Controllers int he Compaq's, thats another diffrent story altogether.
We had roughly 2000 servers, operating 24/7 @ 67 degrees F. Two times a year we had a site shutdown. Every single time we had to bring everything back up we would have anywhere from 3-5 Compaq array controllers die. But never once did the low-buck Adaptecs crap out on us.

• D-Link DFE-570tx 4-port 32bit PCI fast Ethernet adapter
  Phobos P430 (same thing)
  Adaptec 6944a Discontinued model, cheaper -- still 4-port, still 10/100

  Or, if you're lucky enough to be playing with 64 bit PCI @ 66 MHz... there's the newer Adaptec stuff.

  Adaptec 64044 4-port 64bit/66MHz PCI fast Ethernet adapter

Now, to answer the Rick's "Feasible? Stupid?" question...

• Feasible? Certainly. These cards are basically 4 Ethernet chipsets put on one card. The Phobos one uses an Intel DS21143 setup, and can be addressed with generic Linux drivers (tulip.o) as 4 separate devices.

  Stupid? Possibly. Everything coming in from the internet has to pass through the bridge first, and thus pass its' rules. Nothing can directly address it. Pretty much perfectly invulnerable. The only real vulnerability would be a DoS, but that depends on the rules you've plugged into the firewall. In any case, it's impossible to directly compromise the firewall portion of the machine.

  Having the machine providing other services does mean, however, that if something is somehow compromised that your firewall is compromised too -- it's a risk you have to weigh yourself.

  Imagine you're running a webserver on the machine -- with a vulnerable CGI. Someone discovers this, and takes over what they think is "only" a webserver -- only to find they've taken over your company's firewall, too! Ouch.

On the Promise side, the SuperTrak SX6000 is their hardware ATA RAID solution (the PDF datasheet can be found here. The older version of the SuperTrack SX6000, the S/T66, is also a hardware ATA RAID controller. The FastTrak series are their soft-RAID controller series.

I'm personally looking at the 3Ware offerings (as the FreeBSD 4.x kernel has support for it, I believe in the default kernel) and possibly the Adaptec 2400A.

well, THAT fucked up... links == SCSI RAID IDE RAID

well, THAT fucked up... links == SCSI RAID IDE RAID

fyi, you can have a couple of
but yeah, one of <a href="http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/pro ddetail.html?prodkey=ASR-3410S&cat=%2fTechnolo gy%2fRAID%2fTwo+and+Four-Channel+SCSI+RAID">THE SE</a> is preferable.. especially for a server environment :)

I should point out that 'gigabit' SCSI would be 125Mbyte/sec, well below the current speed holders (the Ultra3 standard at 160MByte/sec, and the upcoming Ultra320 at 320MByte/sec.)

For what it's worth in the real datahauling business, firewire is a laugh :)

For my money, it's hard to beat the new ATA RAID cards that are out. Most can be had for less than $100.

Couple that with two or four 80GB drives, for less than $150 each, and you've got yourself a pretty nice array that will keep your data safe against all but the most horrendous problems.

Even with this, you're probably wise to have some offline backup solution to go along with it.

What data would you really want back if your house was swallowed by a hole in the ground? In that situation, do you really need access to your 30GB of MP3 files?

If the anwers is that you really only need access to your Quicken files, then arranging to have those backed up online should be pretty cheap and easy.

Summary: cheap ATA RAID for hardware redundancy, online backup for truly life-critical files.

I too have used a variety of RAID controllers for PCs, and I've probably had the best luck with the current crop of Adaptec controllers - the "SCSI RAID" series, which IIRC Adaptec aquired from DPT.

The line starts with the single channel 2100s and goes up in capacity to the four channel 3410S. Just plug regular SCSI drives into them, use the BIOS mode or provided software to create RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1, or RAID5 volumes, and your host operating system sees the volume as a single SCSI target.

Adaptec seem to be fairly open source friendly. Check out the Adaptec Open Source website. They provide drivers and software for both FreeBSD and Linux. It's nice to have software support for the controller so you don't have to boot into the BIOS to make a configuration change. The docs for the 'dpteng' and related tools was sparse, but I suspect most people could figure it out after a bit of farting around. I know FreeBSD includes support for the controllers via the 'asr' driver included by default in the GENERIC kernel. If the driver isn't in by default in your Linux distro, just download from Adaptec. They work splendidly under Windows 2000 as well, if you need that functionality.

Anyhow, just thought I'd share my experience with this relatively inexpensive controller from Adaptec. I have about 40 2100S and 4 3410S controllers in service, and they've been fine so far (and yes, I've had drive failures with them and done replacements without problems so far). They play well with the SCSI enclosure cards too, which is nice for hot-swap systems and "fancier" rack mount arrays.

On a FreeBSD system, you see:
asr0: mem 0xea000000-0xebffffff irq 11 at device 5.1 on pci1
asr0: ADAPTEC 2100S FW Rev. 3607, 1 channel, 256 CCBs, Protocol I2O

-Mark

I work in the financial industry, so pretty much everything for us needs redundancy. We have our share of Compaq SmartArray 3200's and up. HP NetRAID xM's, and MegaRAID controllers. All are nice. But for our "desktop" servers, which is basically what you are describing to me, we use the Adaptec AAA-131U2 RAID controller.

It's fairly inexpensive, it does RAID0, 1, 0/1 and 5. It's single channel (all you need with 3 drives). It will take almost any EDO SIMM up to 64MB for it's cache. The only real downside is it only supports NetWare 4.11, 4.2, 5.0 SCO Unixware 7.0, and it's not hot-swappable. And the OS req. that's mainly for it's CIO Manager software, which only really alerts you when there is a failed drive. If you going to build a Win box, it's really the simplest choice.

Honestly, we have several years of use of these array controllers, never had one fail, never had one quit. In fact I've never had a problem with any of our Adaptec controllers.

Just my 2 cents though
Windows NT 4.0/2000

It seems that USB 2.0 is a little more available than 1394b, but not by much. For example, Adaptec makes several different USB 2.0 hubs (see http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/prodtechi ndex.html?cat=%2fTechnology%2fUSB&source=home). However, Adaptec doesn't sell any 1394b products yet.

(Yeah, I'm too lazy and ignorant to see what other manufacturers are doing... [grin])

400 MBps for firewire vs. 160 MBps for SCSI.

On a laptop the difference is even higher, since the fastest SCSI PCMCIA adapter you can get is the Adaptec SlimSCSI 1480 at $150 with throughput only 20 MBps vs. the firewire at less than $100 for a PCMCIA card.

Also you can daisy-chain 60 peripherials with firewire vs. 8 with SCSI.

There are at least 2 IDE cards that do hardware RAID. Adaptec AAA-UDMA and Promise Supertrak

Anandtech did a review of 5 different RAID cards (3 software and 2 hardware) in June. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=14 91&p=1. The performance was disapointing (at least to me) but now you can't say that you haven't seen a IDE card do raid 5 in hardware ;)

But....

They're expensive.

Keep in mind that the answer to the question "why don't they" is almost always to be found in the finances of the question at issue.

With that in mind, go visit here for exactly what you've all been looking for.

Btw/ if anyone wants to donate me a few (say 136) of the beasties and an controller to go with them, I'd be most appreciative...

Of course, VLB SCSI cards are few and far between. I've got a fully-decked-out VLB machine (just for the heck of it). It's got a VLB video card, and a VLB cacheing IDE controller, but though I've scrounged the dustbins for a long time, I've never even seen a VLB SCSI card.

Apparently they were made (Adaptec claims to have made some) but they seem to have all evaporated.

Several ways you could get the aldwell system up to spec:

1) there is a model STB3036N-CF(see bottom of page)that has CF
2) use the PCI slot for a multiport ethernet card; there's a bunch of these available, for example the ANA-62022 Two-Port Card by adaptec.
3)the STBII5012 has 2 ethernet interfaces integrated + 2 pci slots; this should easily give you all the options you need.

Why bother with a shim when you can get an Adaptec UDMA/66 RAID (AAA-UDMA) card or a Promise SuperTrak 100 RAID card and handle the storage natively? Both products have been available for a little while and are past version 1 drivers, so they should be fairly stable. Both products will do RAID 5 with 8 or so drives (4 controllers, 2 drives each). At 8 80GB drives in a RAID 5 configuration with one hot-spare, you wind up with 480G of safe storage. Put two cards in a system and you're almost at the terabyte mark. I've used many Promise FastTrak cards in small servers to mirror the data drives, and I've never had one card fail yet. (I did have a drive go bad and the product worked as advertised...) I wouldn't bother with a SCSI solution unless you're going with SCSI drives. As usual, use the right technology for the job.

I must be dreaming, then.

But as you're discovering, on the back end -- the database machine, where failure is much less tolerable -- it is going to be much, much harder to spec out a machine. Your example of hardware RAID is the most suprising area where Linux simply falls down. Even though cards like Compaq's SmartArray RAID controller has working Linux drivers, there are no Linux utilities.

I am sitting 15' away from a Linux machine running with a DPT Century UW2 RAID controller and I've got no problem running the Unix utilities. I can shut drives down, tune both the RAID and cache performance, silence alarms, rebuild RAID volumes, you name it. (It looks like DPT was bought by Adaptec so that may not be the exact card, mine is a hardware cache/RAID controller)

Don't spew FUD. Hell even my ancient P90 had a DPT controller in it with working utilities and that was 5 years ago!

Concurrent AGP would be a great idea for several purposes:

As a faster way to do Ultra-320 SCSI (maybe) than 66MHz 64bit PCI.

Concurrent AGP would be a great idea for several purposes:

As a faster way to do Ultra-320 SCSI (maybe) than 66MHz 64bit PCI.

You silly, silly person. I know that you're a troll, but I hate to see misinformation spread around.

http://linux.adaptec.com

If you don't need encryption, Adaptec's Toast DVD (formerly from Astarte) is $198. It was bought by Apple, so it'll probably be bundled with an iMac in the near future.

The Adaptec 29160 controller card is pretty sweet and should retail for less the $300 US. Any takers?

``info on maximum lengths of SCSI''

In brief, for single-ended SCSI:

Type, MB/sec, Bus, Max. length
SCSI-1, 5, narrow, 6m
SCSI-2, 5, narrow, 6m
SCSI-2 Fast, 10, narrow, 3m
SCSI-2 F/W, 20, wide, 3m
SCSI Ultra, 20, narrow, 3m
SCSI U/W, 40, wide, 1.5m/3m (1)
SCSI U2W, 80, wide, 12m (2)
Ultra160, 160, wide, ??

(1) > 4 devices / (2) > 2 devices

(Sorry for the screwy formatting. Q:Does any website allow use of the damned <pre>/</pre> tags?)

Also, the lengths can be greatly extended if you use Differential SCSI but I'm not sure how well supported these controllers are under Linux. (I'd be extremely interested to see the KZPSA/KZPBA/HSZ combination supported under Linux!)

Ultra160 is already faster than Fiber Channel although there are some very nifty SAN products that connect via Fiber Channela and allow multiple hosts to share storage arrays (also applicability to Linux is unknown). I've not followed the Ultra160 products very closely but I doubt that they work very well outside the server cabinet (unless you go differential, that is). Whitepapers available on Adaptec's web site are predicting that Ultra320 will be available in 2001. IMHO, for mass storage, Firewire is already dead and getting deader. Maybe some sort of portable backup medium can connect to Firewire but I can't see anyone hanging significant disk space off of it.

Ultra160 specs

To find out what Mean Time Between Failure really means, try this Adaptec Whitepaper for an informative look as to how an MTBF can be calculated.
Joseph Elwell.

Sounds like you need help finding the Macintosh Product Guide

...how many manufacturers make hardware for your appletosh?

Try out the Hardware section.

You want a cdburner for your mac

I already have one, thanks. A Yamaha with Adaptec Toast.
Adaptec lists over 150 Mac-compatible CD-R/RW drives in their database (select toast from bottom menu).

a floppy drive?

iFloppy
SuperDisk
Addonics
Teac

a G4 upgrade?

PowerLogix
Newertech

where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I'll send you to Microsoft's own website for more information about that little feature called meta-data.

Or read how the Microsoft Annual report was written on a Macintosh.

It's so funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.

Sounds like you need help finding the Macintosh Product Guide

...how many manufacturers make hardware for your appletosh?

Try out the Hardware section.

You want a cdburner for your mac

I already have one, thanks. A Yamaha with Adaptec Toast.
Adaptec lists over 150 Mac-compatible CD-R/RW drives in their database (select toast from bottom menu).

a floppy drive?

iFloppy
SuperDisk
Addonics
Teac

a G4 upgrade?

PowerLogix
Newertech

where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I'll send you to Microsoft's own website for more information about that little feature called meta-data.

Or read how the Microsoft Annual report was written on a Macintosh.

It's so funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.

Sounds like you need help finding the Macintosh Product Guide

...how many manufacturers make hardware for your appletosh?

Try out the Hardware section.

You want a cdburner for your mac

I already have one, thanks. A Yamaha with Adaptec Toast.
Adaptec lists over 150 Mac-compatible CD-R/RW drives in their database (select toast from bottom menu).

a floppy drive?

iFloppy
SuperDisk
Addonics

a G4 upgrade?

PowerLogix
Newertech

where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I'll send you to Microsoft's own website for more information about that little undocumented feature called meta-data.



It's so funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.

Sounds like you need help finding the Macintosh Product Guide

...how many manufacturers make hardware for your appletosh?

Try out the Hardware section.

You want a cdburner for your mac

I already have one, thanks. A Yamaha with Adaptec Toast.
Adaptec lists over 150 Mac-compatible CD-R/RW drives in their database (select toast from bottom menu).

a floppy drive?

iFloppy
SuperDisk
Addonics

a G4 upgrade?

PowerLogix
Newertech

where do you guys come up with this stuff?

I'll send you to Microsoft's own website for more information about that little undocumented feature called meta-data.



It's so funny when people talk about things they know nothing about.

Expensive? Well, what generally happens on the Mac is that you can't get the super cheap stuff (i.e. the $5 NIC cards, the $3 keyboards, etc.), but the decent stuff is about the same price as on x86. See Adaptec's Mac product page (these are the cards Apple bundles when you order SCSI from the Apple store anyway).

It doesn't make sense that IEEE would develop a spec for something that
was already patented. Did Apple waive it's patent to get IEEE approval?

If a company hires you to write code for an application, they own that application. They are paying you to write the code. I think everyone agrees here.

Now, say you use the code (or portions of it) for a project done in your own time and try to market this product..

How about if you are a system administrator at a large company, look at code for a project and use that to start a product of your own...

Adaptec has an intersting press release which involved former employees releasing a product with their code.

Bottom line: keep your mouth shut and don't sign stupid contracts. Especially if you are paid a flat salery, it is very difficult to prove what was done on "your" time and what wasn't. I've had one hourly-wage job where the employer put something like this in the agreement. That part got crossed out!

Fibre Channel is FireWire, sort of like how Mac calls PCMCIA cards PC cards. Its part of the device bay standard and I heard the Windows 98 SP is going to add more support for it. And its not meant to replace USB. And what else, oh Adeptc does have a FireWire card, look at their product line here