Date: Sun, 12 Dec 1999 23:00:02 -0700 From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org> To: "Gary D. Margiotta" <gary@tbe.net> Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Tekram vs. Adaptec U2W Message-ID: <19991212230002.A25439@panzer.kdm.org> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9912122003180.13341-100000@thud.tbe.net>; from gary@tbe.net on Sun, Dec 12, 1999 at 08:08:46PM -0500 References: <Pine.LNX.4.10.9912122003180.13341-100000@thud.tbe.net>
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On Sun, Dec 12, 1999 at 08:08:46PM -0500, Gary D. Margiotta wrote: > Heya... > > Am about to purchase 2 u2w controllers for a box... I was thinking of > purchasing a Tekram card, but I'm an Adaptec fan. A friend of mine bought > a Tekram card, and won't stop raving about it, and he has an Adaptec u2w > also. > > I was just wondering if anyone has any good experiences with the Tekram > cards, and has an opinion as to whether I should buy one instead of going > the Adaptec way. > > The box is already a news server, dual PII-450, 512MB RAM, and has a good > amount of use. We will be running 9 drives per card, in Kingston data > silos. There will be no RAID array of any sort. so no need to use a DPT > card, or require any card to have RAID support. There are several things to point out here: - A Tekram board can mean one with a NCR/Symbios/LSI chip, one with an AMD 53c974 (DC390, I think) or one with Tekram's own Ultra-Wide chip (the DC395 boards, I think). I would advise against getting an AMD-based board for anything but a cheap SCSI board, and I wouldn't advise getting boards based on their Ultra-Wide chip. Tekram has written a FreeBSD driver for their TRM-S1040, but from the implementation it appears that the chip, like the AMD 53c974, doesn't have a SCSI phase engine. If you're going to get a Tekram board, get one of their Symbios/LSI based boards. - I would not recommend the stock FreeBSD ncr driver for production use. I know many people have had good success with it, and will swear that their hardware has never given them trouble, and on and on, but that doesn't change the facts: - The ncr driver isn't being actively maintained. - Its error recovery code leaves much to desired. Most people who have had great success with their NCR boards also probably haven't had very many SCSI hardware problems. I would recommend the sym driver, written by Gerard Roudier <groudier@club-internet.fr>. The sym driver is actively maintained, but is still in the beta phase. The source is located here: ftp://ftp.tux.org/tux/roudier/drivers/freebsd/experimental If you want to use the driver in production, contact Gerard first. - The Adaptec driver/hardware is being used in production in many, many places. It is well maintained and supported, and is certainly a much better alternative than the ncr driver. Once Gerard's sym driver gets to the "release" stage, it will probably be just as good a choice as the Adaptec driver. - If you do use an Adaptec board, I would suggest using a very recent -stable or FreeBSD 3.4. There was an important work-around for a bug in the 7890 that went in just after FreeBSD 3.3, and Justin checked in some termination fixes for the 7896/7 this weekend. Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@kdm.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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