[1411] in linux-scsi channel archive
SCSI+SMP: which motherboard and SCSI controller
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Holger Schwenk)
Mon Feb 10 20:50:01 1997
From: Holger Schwenk <schwenk@IRO.UMontreal.CA>
To: linux-smp@vger.rutgers.edu, linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
Date: Mon, 10 Feb 1997 19:02:22 -0500 (EST)
Cc: schwenk@IRO.UMontreal.CA (Holger Schwenk)
Hello,
We are on the way to buy a SMP-machine for number crunching (2 Pentium Pro 200 Mhz,
256K cache and 128 MB of RAM).
Although I've followed the news and the smp- and scsi-mailing liste for while, I am
not sure at all which hardware to choose.
The Tyan 1668 and the Supermicro P6DNF motherboards seem quite good (both can take
8 SIMMs and allow long cards in all PCI/ISA slots).
The Supermicro P6DOF is also interesting since it uses the 450GX chipset allowing
memory interleaving.
Unfortunately the ASUS P65UP5 + CPU-card seems to be more expensive.
For each of the above motherboards I have found recomandations and warnings that it does
not work very well.
I would really like to be surer that the configuration will work.
Even harder is the choice of an Ultra Wide SCSI controller.
Almost every vendor that I've contacted (Montreal area) has only a A9240 UW card, but I've
heard of several troubles and the missing support by Adaptec is not really encouraging to
use this card for a SMP machine.
A Buslogic BT-958 seems to be a better choice since I could hope for help in case of problems
(Buslogic supports Linux). Somebody has a succes story for me (Pro-SMP) ?
By the way, the discussions whether A2940 ot BT-958 deal "only" of the stability of the
drivers. What about performance (on a wide disk, like Qunatum Atlas) ?
Thanks for your advice
(I will summarize and repost once the system running)
Holger
P.S. we plan to use Linux 2.0.27 (2.0.28 seems to be unstable)
