[3188] in linux-scsi channel archive
Re: Micropolis drives
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leonard N. Zubkoff)
Tue Feb 3 13:56:00 1998
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 10:19:42 -0800
From: "Leonard N. Zubkoff" <lnz@dandelion.com>
To: jbs@quiotix.com
CC: dave@nic.com, linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
In-reply-to: <34D721E8.54CF80E5@quiotix.com> (jbs@quiotix.com)
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 1998 05:55:52 -0800
From: "Jeffrey B. Siegal" <jbs@quiotix.com>
You might also look at the 9GB IBM drives. They're Wide (not Ultra) and about
$500 but they come with a 5 year warranty from a real company that's still in
business.
Let me second this recommendation. I have a few of these 9GB IBM Ultrastar 2XP
drives on FlashPoint LW's and they have been rock solid reliable, just as the
older Ultrastar XP's before them. Considering their price relative to other
quality 9GB drives, I'm happy to live without Ultra support; if you really need
sequential I/O performance enough that this limitation will be a problem, set
them up as RAID-0 split across multiple host adapters. Their seek optimization
algorithm doesn't seem to be quite as good as the Quantum Atlas II or Seagate
Barracuda and Cheetah, but I purchased two of the IBM's for the price of one
Cheetah, and striped together on split channels they easily beat the Cheetah in
overall performance.
I'm planning to make a RAID-5 or RAID 0+1 with several of these on a DAC960
once my DAC960 driver is ready for production use.
The only problems I've heard of or seen are:
(1) One person reported some problems with the default firmware that came in
the drive. It was 5353 if I recall correctly. All of mine originally came
with 2222 and I upgraded to 6363, both of which have worked perfectly.
(2) After doing a low level format in AutoSCSI, you need to reset the system
before a verify will proceed. I have no idea why this is, but it is a
minor inconvenience at most.
(3) I believe write caching is turned off by default, so you may want to use
the SCSIINFO package to enable it.
As with all 7200 rpm drives, make sure they are kept cool.
Leonard
