On Wednesday, December 3, 2003, at 06:03 PM, Jeff Walther wrote:
Ah! When I started this project I imagined having the two wide HD's on
the 68 pin cable of the Jackhammer on their own. I was hopping to
create a striped volume, then put a system folder on it, and be able to
boot from this striped volume. I thought that would speed up the
system. Is this never going to be possible (you say you needed a boot
drive)?
This should be completely possible, barring bugs in HDTK. As I recall, version 3.x had some kind of problem wtih Adaptec controllers and RAID, but I never heard of a problem with the NuBus JackHammer.
I suspect that the software is the problem. I don't have RAID Toolkit, perhaps I should try to get this but I'm getting a little disillusioned. I bought 3.0.2 (from eBay) at FWB's recommendation, after explaining my hardware/software situation. There has to be a point at which I stop throwing money (well small change really) at this system :-(
Your problem does indeed sound like an issue with termination or cabling.
I don't believe this is the case. I have tried both using the jackHammer to supply term power and the drive supplying its own power. Both perform the same. In addition I can run the two drives happily as two simple volumes (boots fine, and drives test fine). Also if I set the jumpers for "Enable SCSI start", the drives will not spin at boot time, resulting in a happy boot. I can then use HDTK to manually mount the stripped volume successfully.
I do now have a cable with a terminator built into the end. I will try this, but I don't expect this to help.
However, another thing to look for is whether you've set the RAID volume as "automount" and "bootable" using the appropriate utility. FWB changed this need and the utility at some point, but I think it was still in a separate app from the main HDTK app in version 3.x.
I do have a copy of HDTK PE version 1.6, that I picked up for a buck :-) I got this to work with a JackHammer, one ST15150W, and OS 6.0.8 in a IIci :-)!!! Not a RAID array, but the point is this s/w required that you specify that the partition be "bootable" if you want that. So I looked all over the 3.0.2 version for a similar setting but couldn't find it. It does have a selection for "automount" which I used.
One thing slightly off the exact topic. You won't see much performance with a RAID of ST15150 drives. They're slow--about 4 MB/s in real world performanc. I bet you'd get about 6 maybe 7 MB/s sustained performance out two of them in a RAID.
This is a good point. Somebody told me the NuBus bus only could do 10Mb/s. When I get the stripe mounted and running I'm only getting 4~5 MB/s. So I wasn't expecting much. This was more about RAID/SCSI hands-on education :-)
A single drive of a more modern vintage could supply close to the 20 MB/s potential of the JackHammer. But, that might cost money of course...
Originally I had visions of doing more than 2 drives in one of the more secure RAID schemes. I liked the idea of having some secure storage available on my home network. I've just got hung up making the basics work. Also FWB HDTK can only do RAID 0 or RAID 1 :-( Got any other s/w suggestions?
John
P.S. My wife thinks RAID is supposed to get rid of bugs - not create them :-)
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