Recommendations for fixed-disk SCSI Controllers

[John G. DeArmond]

karl at naitc.naitc.com (Karl Denninger) writes:

>In article <37532 at cup.portal.com> DeadHead at cup.portal.com (Bruce M Ong) writes:
>>The Interactive Release Notes for 2.2 says on page 19 that on machines
>>with SCSI primary adaptors and multipe SCSI fixed disks doing very heavy
>>disk I/O, the kernel may panic or the system may hang. Has anybody
>>experienced this problem with Future Domain or Adaptec host adaptors?

>Sure, if you have a marginal motherboard.  

>I am running 3 disks and a tape on SCSI, and haven't had a panic related to
>fixed disk access yet.  And those disks get the crap pounded out of them
>regularly.

I'll second that motion!  Several of the guys around here bought
Micronics motherboards at the then hotrod 25 mhz and one upgraded to 33
mhz.  They've had nightmares.  Daily panics, flaky async operation, VGA
adaptor problems, network problems and the like.  We went with a rather
conservative 20 mhz Magitronics motherboard on this machine and Compaq
DeskPro 33 mhz units on others and they've been rock-solid.  No SCSI
problems unless lightening strikes nearby and that is a function of our
external drive cabinets and long SCSI cables.  We have over a gig online
with 3 spindles with an Adaptec 1542A here. We've seen uptimes > 2 months
and even then, the reboot was either just for drill or because we wanted
to alter the hardware. 

I'd suggest you take ISC's approved hardware list seriously.  Someone from
ISC ought to post that list to the net periodically in order to keep us
updated on what they know works.

John


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