Woops, he did it again...

[Riptide]

That's right, spent a huge amount of money he didn't have in order to keep up with and in this case surpass the Joneses.

What is it this time you ask?

An Adaptec 39320-R SCSI controller w/HostRAID and accompanying 36GB Cheetah X15 drives. Going to put these babies in RAID 0/striped.

Should pretty much thrash the Raptor. The controller is PCI-X compatible so it'll be somewhat future proof (and @ U320 as well...).

Now, if I can only get over this attack of diverticulitis I might actually enjoy putting the array together this Wednesday night. :rolleyes:

[CaptNKILL]

Who is "he"?

[Riptide]

Originally posted by CaptNKILL
Who is "he"?
Why he is me ofcourse. :D

[poursoul]

damn sweet riptide.

don't forget about the 39160, it looks like next week!

[nVidi0t]

Should have gone for SATA!

[D0T-C0M]

i will never buy another adaptec product ever again. Aweful aweful support and I never got the performance I was supposed to get out of my u160 drive.

Could be the drive people will say but adaptec wasn't interested in providing support and dragged me out for more than a month till I was out of warranty and then told me that I should pay by calling their 1-900 tech line for further support. IBM went the extra mile to help me out.

Sorry for flamming them but it's how I feel.

[The Baron]

My God. The SCSI. The SCSI.

BTW, is SCSI fuzzy?

[Riptide]

Originally posted by nVidi0t
Should have gone for SATA!

Other than price, there was no reason to do that. My array should pretty much smoke two Raptors striped...

[Riptide]

Originally posted by D0T-C0M
i will never buy another adaptec product ever again. Aweful aweful support and I never got the performance I was supposed to get out of my u160 drive. <snip>

I can't blame you if you had such an awful experience. Adaptec's support is, I admit, pathetic. Which is why it pays to make sure you know what you're getting will do the job and return it immediately if it doesn't.

IBM, Seagate, etc. (the disc makers) seem to have great support. Adaptec could stand to learn a thing or two from them.

[Rampant CL]

I have a couple of tape streamers hooked up to my adaptec controller, and the controller works well. When it comes to windows recognising the streamers, i have great trouble convincing it that they are not unknown scsi devices. (I modified the win2k drivers an hd that got them working)

[The Baron]

Other than price, there was no reason to do that. My array should pretty much smoke two Raptors striped...
But will it be as fast as these? (http://www.envynews.com/review.php?ID=417)

[Riptide]

Judging by those ATTO results it should be at LEAST as fast as that if not faster. Keep in mind we're talking about 15,000RPM drives here (the Cheetahs)...

Don't get me wrong, those are some smoking fast drives. But better than the results I *should* see with my two Cheetahs in RAID 0? No.

[Riptide]

Attached are my ATTO results. Notice the performance of a SINGLE DRIVE. Impressive? Thanks. ;)

Oh, and Sandra also scores almost 50meg a second read times with that single drive. The link you posted showed a quick result of not quite 70, but as you can see the Cheetah should have no problem pouncing on her prey. :D

I will soon be feasting on raptors for breakfast... BTW, make sure to use toothpicks, those claws can get stuck in yer teeth!!

[The Baron]

IT WAS A RHETORICAL QUESTION!

;)

[Riptide]

Doh! Sorry... :)

[Riptide]

I got the array together last night. And a big FU to adaptec. They shipped me a controller that requires a BIOS update to enable HostRAID support. Ofcourse, the documentation said absolutely zero about that. So I spent hours last night spinning in circles trying to figure out why the RAID option wasn't showing up. Doh! At least someone on abxzone knew the answer or I would've been shipping the card back this morning. Those bastids @ adaptec and their shoddy documentation! :banghead:

Anyhow, the array is together and I did some preliminary ATTO testing. It shows performance on part with those Maxtor drives, but no better. So I'm a little disappointed. That was until I realized that both configs are probably bumping up against the limitations of 32bit PCI. So, I probably won't be able to pull away until I get a PCI-X compatible motherboard and realize the full performance. Oh well... :(

Now, when I get home tonight I have to disable HostRAID again and rebuild everything. Why? Because I foolishly forgot to set the new drive in the array to "Desktop Performance" mode via Seagate's Seatools. The first drive is set that way, the new one isn't. That's an inconsistency I don't like. Unfortunately, once the RAID array is configured you have to take it down to access the drives again on an individual basis. Oops... That screwup is my fault and is going to cost me some timage...