SCSI's great. IMO, it'll always be faster, no matter what the IDE drive specs state. I run both my workstations on SCSI, and love it. It is pricey, however. The good news is that almost all mainstream SCSI RAID controllers have Linux support (IIRC). I run a Dell PERC2/DC (Ultra2, rebadged AMI EliteRAID 1500) in my other workstation. Works great with the megaraid driver.
so you like the AMI EliteRAID1500. ? how feature full is the driver? can you blink disk LEDS?
The card isn't available on the new market at the moment, as far as I know, but the info about the drivers should apply to all LSI cards now (all of the new stuff should be under the megaraid driver, if I understand right).
Re: The Driver. The short answer is I don't really know at the moment, as I haven't had much time to play with it. The driver has been very painless so far (2.4.22, driver revision 1.18k), and has a pretty nice /proc interface with all the right info, but not writable stuff. You may be able to do so in the mailbox file, but I'm not sure.
I've just tried out the MegaRAID manager (you can grab it from the LSI site -- just download the "Red Hat 8" driver, which is actually just a tarball), and you can do anything you can do in the BIOS with it (I suspect it is just a bridge to the BIOS). As I haven't got any drives connected to the adapter at the moment, I can't confirm whether or not you can flash drive lights.
On vendor gear, I'm sure everyone's had some pretty bad experiences. I know we had some horrors with a nice shiny Adaptec SAN we got in a while back (which was then resolved pretty quickly, actually, once the right people heard about it..). The IBM gear I've used lately all uses the LSI Fusion MPT Ultra320 chipset (which even does RAID1 natively!), and seems very, very nice, though I've yet to be able to put Linux on one of these puppies (Netware 6 and Win2k so far) - I think all the big names are using this chipset now. It may even be the one LSI is using on the RAID adapters. I tend to lean towards researching hardware very carefully, but then buying from a big name, to try and save myself from the blame game ("oh no, it's definitely XYZ's equipment.. couldn't be ours.."). Just my $0.02.
Cheers,
Matt
-- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
