From owner-freebsd-scsi Mon Aug 9 22: 4:55 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-scsi@freebsd.org Received: from misery.sdf.com (misery.sdf.com [204.244.213.49]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CDD5114FBE for ; Mon, 9 Aug 1999 22:04:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tom@sdf.com) Received: from tom (helo=localhost) by misery.sdf.com with local-esmtp (Exim 2.12 #1) id 11E2yR-0005Ds-00; Mon, 9 Aug 1999 20:53:15 -0700 Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 20:52:56 -0700 (PDT) From: Tom To: Mike Tancsa Cc: "Kenneth D. Merry" , scsi@freebsd.org Subject: Re: External RAID boxes (was Re: AHC errors. Bad disk or bad firmware, or bug in driver ?) In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990809141220.01086510@staff.sentex.ca> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Mon, 9 Aug 1999, Mike Tancsa wrote: > The exact price was $4700 Canadian, and then they wanted to charge me about > $900 CDN per Segate Medalist or $1000CDN for I think the IBM Deskstar. So I > guess, ~6500 USD with 5 drives > > >You'll want something that does tagged queueing, and handles a reasonable > >number of transactions. And, most importantly, you'll want a controller > >without nasty firmware bugs. :) FreeBSD/CAM has a tendency to expose > >problems that don't crop up as often in other OSes. > > Before making any commitments, I do plan to dejanews through as many > threads as possible. The legacy (www.legacy.ca) box looks nice in that > the warrentee is decent (overnight replacement from down the road from us > for 3yrs), and the price seems nice. But stability is what I am looking > for most of all. +-$1K at that range is not that critical.. stability is > the key for me. I am not sure what I would end up paying for in the equiv. > Mylex device. Legacy make some pretty amusing stuff. They sell direct and via various wholesellers (ie Globelle). I can get Legacy stuff cheaper from Globelle than I can direct from Legacy. Legacy is basically just an integrator. They slap a RAID controller, and some drives together in a box, and then put their name on it. In fact, I think Legacy uses CMD RAID units in their boxes. There is nothing that Legacy is doing that you can't do yourself. Overnight replacement is no concern for me, as overnight is still too long! And if you've lost data because of the failure... There should be a enough resilency so that failures aren't a problem. All high-end drives have 5yr warranties, BTW. If I was going to setup a high-avail box, I'd use two CMD raid units. They have some kind of fail over mode where one can take over if one fails (I don't belive Legacy gives you this as an option, but you can if you build it yourself). Disks would combined with RAID-5, and an online spare (or two). Tom To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-scsi" in the body of the message