> My question is this: what is the recommended card of those using the
> PCI cards for SCSI drives on the sun, and how is it working out. (The
> machine this is going on is in a remote location and the user was
> confused as to how to hook up his SCSI tape drive to the box... So we
> need to make this as simple as possible.)
Respondents: (6 over night more may come but I will get this out)
Peter Laws <plaws@nssl.noaa.gov>
Jose Morales <jmorales@polar.es>
Tim Carlson <tim@santafe.edu>
Benjamin Cline <benji@hnt.com>
Aaron Lineberger <aaron@pinn.net>
John Malick <john@starinc.com>
Phil Kao <Phil.ao@artecon.com> New Arrival before I hit send.
********** Data/Facts **********
Over all I am being told to go with the Sun PCI card that way it will
have the best support. When (if) troubles occur. Implying I will have
troubles with non Sun Cards. That could be true neither company will say
our fault, when it is both of their faults. :)
Why can they not come up with some defacto standard for all drivers and
keep things nice and compatible... (Destroys competition and free
enterprise.)
One group uses Ultra Systems (5 and 10) with 8MM drives. They stated:
"Good results with the X1032A card from SMCC. Probe-scsi is *way* slow,
tho'."
One gent did not have the part numbers but stated I they use SunSwift,
or the PCI UltraScsi by Symbiosis for SUN, and both work like a charm.
They also added the following lest we forget all the steps we must take!
"As for the install of the cards and the Tape drive should be as
painless
as installing the card and halt the machine, do a boot -r (for
reconfigure) and test the drive with a simple tar cvf /dev/rmt/0 to see
if this works.... make sure the target id for the tape drive should be
5, if you set another target id the you have to change the alias at the
OpenBoot Promt, this is could get complicated...."
Another Gent stated:
"I just bought one Integrated Solutions Group www.isgsun.com
Got a fast wide card and a 9Gig drive for $1250"
I was informed to possibly avoid Adaptec because of problems.
"I tried to use Adaptec's cards unsuccessfully for a few weeks, I even
had
their engineers unable to explain why a new machine with just the base
OS
would have this many problems on a card that was supposedly compatible.
Finally gave up and bought a Sun card which worked perfectly without any
problems."
Then I had one Gent that put in a plug for his own company. I wish I
could take it as Spam, but I can not... I did ask for suggested
companies! :)
Now lets not get mad at him... He did say that I asked.
"Artecon also sells the PCI-based and SBus-based SCSI cards.
Ours do work with the Ultra series as they are SCSI-3 speeds.
This should not be an issue at all for your customer's tape
drives.
We offer single channel single ended through dual channel
differential.
One word of caution, if your tape drive is narrow, you should
terminate the high 9 lines on the wide cards. We don't sell
narrow SCSI cards.
(By the way, I usually don't advertise for my company, but
since you asked.....)"
Thank You to all those who have responded and are still to come.
I do not know maybe I will have to go with the Sun Card pay more money,
and
have a card that will be 100% supported rather than a 50/50 job. That
would really stink to have to get both sides on the line.
- Leif Ericksen
leif@imho.net
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:52 CDT