From owner-freebsd-hardware Thu Sep 6 3:44:41 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Received: from workhorse.iMach.com (workhorse.iMach.com [206.127.77.89]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 374DA37B407 for ; Thu, 6 Sep 2001 03:44:37 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (forrestc@localhost) by workhorse.iMach.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id EAA01898 for ; Thu, 6 Sep 2001 04:45:52 -0600 (MDT) Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 04:45:51 -0600 (MDT) From: "Forrest W. Christian" To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: IDE Controllers (Multiple) Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org I need to find out if there are any (inexpensive) controllers out there which will support a total (using multiple controllers if necessary) of around 12-16 IDE devices in a single box. Using "traditional" IDE controllers, we would be talking 8 chains, 2 of which are likely already on the motherboard, and we could probably add another 3 cards each with 2 chains, to get the additional 6 IDE chains. That said, I can't find any real solid documentation on whether any more than 4 chains (8 drives) will work in a freebsd box, or which controllers might support this configuration. For those that might wonder: this is actually for a "semi-hot" offsite backup which gets mirrored once a night, plus gzip'd dumps of the mirrored drives to another set of drives. We're not performance critical, and if we loose a drive, oh well... It's not worth spending the extra few thousand on SCSI drives if we can avoid it. No, we're not going to try to run vinum, and we're probably only going to be working with one or two spindles at a time and we'll try to split the load across controllers. Any ideas? - Forrest W. Christian (forrestc@imach.com) AC7DE ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Innovation Machine Ltd. P.O. Box 5749 http://www.imach.com/ Helena, MT 59604 Home of PacketFlux Technogies and BackupDNS.com (406)-442-6648 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect your personal freedoms - visit http://www.lp.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message