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Date:      Wed, 20 Sep 2000 22:30:16 -0400 (EDT)
From:      bv@wjv.com
To:        freebsd-isp@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Frustration with SCSI system
Message-ID:  <200009210230.WAA92904@mail.wanlogistics.net>

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> On Thu, 21 Sep 2000, Aleksandr A.Babaylov wrote:

> :I work since 1991 with computer hardware and know exact
> :that SCSI drives is about ten times less reliability than
> :IDE. Yes, I understand that SCSI was more ... extremal may be.
> :I am wery glad that now mostly no need in SCSI drives at all.
> :Just use good IDE drives, may be second root and regular
> :dumps to, for example DDS-4 strimer. It is cost effective.

> This is totatlly contrary to my experience. Heck, I've got a fair
> number of SCSI disks that predate 1991, happily spinning away.
> SCSI just works, on everything I've ever used it. I've had a
> occaisonal problems with things like termination. High quality
> cables and enclosures solve this. I wouldn't let an IDE disk get
> within thinking distance of machine whose reliability I cared
> about.

My experience agrees with yours but there are some serious
SCSI exceptions.

Quantum's high end drives - based on the DEC HD drives - are quite
reliable - however their low end drives really were pretty bad.

The Fireball series was pretty bad.  Those were typically logic
board failures and a tech and I pulled one client out of the fire
[they had no recent backups] buy buying a brand new drive and
taking the circuit from it and putting it on the bad drive.
Typical was that motor would not spin up.  Quantum dropped those.

Seagate line is spotty.  THe old Hawk drive when they first took
over the CDC line/design wer good - big old 5.25" beasties.

The 3.5" Hawks were less than stellar.  SGI shipped them in the
Indy's and we have those fail - within a year after 1 year warranty
expired.   The early 'cuddas had problems if you didn't keep them
cool. 

Micropolis was so bad that's one reason they aren't around today.

Stay far away from the cheap/low-end SCSI drives.  One clue in that
area is that I've found that the SCSI drives with the 5 years
warranties really are pretty relialbe - and if they do have a
problem you can get them replaced.  The 1 and 3 year warranted
drives barely make throught the warranty period on the ones I've
seen.

The only Unix systems on which I've had IDE drives are those
in my test-bed machine with swappable IDEs and that machine is
designed to test things, and single drive IDE isn't that bad of
a perfomrmer when I'm the only one using it.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv@wjv.com



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