On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 08:59:17AM -0500, Neil Gunton wrote: > I've never done that (at install time anyway) - are you talking about > just using something like modprobe or insmod?
Yes using modprobe (insmod should almost never be used manually). > I always thought Adaptec was a pretty major company. I guess I was wrong > (or at least chose a card that turned out to be kind of a loser). I > thought that drivers were difficult back in 2005 because the card was so > new. Now it appears the opposite - nobody is using it because it just > never took off at all. I remember all the hype about i2o a long time ago, and I thought it had totally disappeared. I was rather surprised a couple of years ago when someone asked how to get i2o working with the amd64 sarge installer. Adaptec is a large company, but it seems a lot less low end users bother with scsi anymore. I think the main market is enterprise level with SAS today. Parallel shared single point of failure busses are fortunately going away now. > Maybe next time I should go with one of those 3Ware SATA RAID cards. I > heard they are blowing the doors off anything else in terms of speed. > But I'm a little concerned about SATA drive reliability. Well my personal experience is that I have had less drive failures with SATA than with SCSI. So who knows. People with larger data sets or different brands will have different results. > Does anyone have a handle on if/why SCSI would be more reliable than > SATA? I remember reading that SCSI drives are built better, but SATA > seems so attractive pricewise these days that I'm wondering if I should > just go with that next time. How about speed with SATA vs SCSI - anybody > have practical experience of that? Well certainly the claim is that scsi drives are better built, although I think today the main feature of scsi drives is that you can get 15k rpm drives with faster seek times (well not counting the WD raptor drives which seem to be basically scsi style disks with SATA interface, at scsi prices). I think the main reason sata/pata drives are cheaper is simply volume for the most part. > If you still want tops in speed and reliability, is SCSI still the way > to go? It seems to be dying, except perhaps on the server. If you want fast random access, you go scsi. If you want pure sequential transfer rate, you go sata. The much higher density of the media on the large sata drives can not be matched by the higher rpm but much lower density of even the largest scsi drives. The fast rpm and low seek time is for random access and multiple simultanious accesses, but not for transfer rate. You generally can make up the transfer rate using striping or raid5/6 or similar. The idea seems to be that having smaller disks with faster access to any given sector using many disks and hence many heads, is faster than using a few large disks with less headers as a result. After all SAS drives seem to be going 2.5" to a large extent in order to fit even more disks with more heads in the same space. -- Len Sorensen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
