Need advice on disk drive selection for ISC 2.2

[Conor P. Cahill]

In article <682 at fltk.UUCP> dnb at fltk.UUCP (David Buonomo) writes:
>drive.  I still have reservations about this decision due to this drive
>having a 20,000 hour MTBF.  Should I be concerned?

This sounds low.  If you run your system 24 hrs a day, you can expect to
have a drive failure within 3 years (1,000 days or so).  I couldn't tell 
you what the MTBF is for the drives that I am using so I can't say how
this compares to other drives.

Three years can be considered a long time in the pc-unix industry (you
will probably replace the drive by than anyway) so it may be no big deal.

>I could also use some advice on selecting a controller.  Since it's SCSI,
>I believe I'm limited to Adaptec or Future Domain.  Are there any controllers
>I should stay away from?  I've not heard much about Future Domain; any
>suggestions?

The Adapted (and the Bustek - which is an Adaptec look-alike) will run 
in bus-master mode and burst data across the bus (yes, it will even 
do that on an ISA bus).  This gives them better performance
than the Future domain controller.

However, not all mother boards will accept bus master cards (we have
two systems that had all kinds of problems with the Adaptec and bustek
controllers before we gave up on them).  The future domain, while using
programmed io still has pretty good performance.



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Conor P. Cahill            (703)430-9247        Virtual Technologies, Inc.,
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