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Re: [OT] SCSI Primer



On Wed, 9 Mar 2005 11:15:52 -0600
Gnu-Raiz <Gnu-Raiz@midsouth.rr.com> wrote:

> On 00:58, Wed 09 Mar 05, Seeker5528 wrote:
> > On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 16:58:14 -0600
> > Jacob S <stormspotter@6Texans.net> wrote:
> > 
> > > Does anyone know of a good tutorial with pictures and descriptions
> > > of the different connectors, explaining what can inter-operate
> > > with what advantages and disadvantages, etc? My googling has been
> > > fairly futile so far.
> > 
> > I don't know of any general documentation, and SCSI is not my
> > specialty.
> > 
> > Having said that I do have some limited experience.

Thanks, Seeker. 

I was familiar with most of that, but it's still a good review. I had a
chance to play with a couple 6 cpu machines at work once that had RAID 5
cards in them, so I have the elementary knowledge, just not enough
details for my satisfaction. :-) 

> This is a good article that goes into the basics and a
> little back ground about SCSI.
> http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/scsi/std/scsi3.html
> 
> This is the site responsible for the standard, and as such
> has not so friendly of a layout.
> http://www.t11.org/index.htm

Thanks, Gnu_Raiz
They both look like good links.

> Now as far as raid is concerned you might want to follow
> some of the threads in here in the past. It seems that under
> Linux software raid seems to be a good choice, as some
> hardware raid lacks the proper drivers and does not seem to
> work under all conditions.

Yes, I've seen the threads you referenced. I will probably be trying to
learn software raid in addition to playing with the RAID cards I have in
these servers.

> I would not suggest you mix and match too much, it might
> work, but if something goes wrong you might have a nightmare
> trying to figure out what is wrong. I would sell old stuff
> on Ebay, or build a system with only those parts, then build
> another system with the newer parts. Also what exactly are
> you going to use the system for, server, gaming, or other
> needs. Are your other parts up to the task, for instance if
> your a server and serving files over a network do you have
> the proper nic's.

Yes, it looks like I would be trying to use a narrow host adapter on
a wide backplane (these backplanes support hot-swapping, btw). 

These servers are just antiques that I'm using for experimentation.
I'm mainly using them for learning about openMosix and other clustering
software right now. (Antique as in dual Pentium-Pro 200Mhz in 2 servers
and dual PII 333Mhz in the 3rd, at least 512MB of ram in each.) I will
probably be selling them on Ebay once I get done playing and
experimenting with them - they take a ton of space and generate a ton of
noise. :-) 

> A lot of people think that scsi will answer all their
> prayers, jump whole hog wanting the fastest speeds possible.
> But in fact their are other bottlenecks that do not allow
> them to take advantage of the speed. The network is a good
> example, memory, bandwidth, you almost have to build the
> infastructure to take advantage of what SCSI can bring.

No worries there. I just bought the servers for experimentation, not the
RAID cards or any kind of high performance stuff. Oh and the RAID 5 card
I'm trying to put into a different server came out of a 4th server that
appears to have a bad motherboard.

Thanks again,
Jacob



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