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Hardware

Adaptec Supporting Ultra160 On IA-64 Linux 84

Posted by timothy from the another-piece-of-the-puzzle dept.
GeorgieBoy writes: "Adaptec has announced support for Ultra160 SCSI adapters under Intel 64-bit Linux. Looks like IA-64 Linux will be pretty well supported upon Itanium's arrival." There already are SCSI adapters for the (also 64-bit) Alpha under Linux, but this move sounds like a smart one for Adaptec to tie their name to both Linux and IA-64. Other companies planning pre-emptive hardware support? Step right up, please.
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Adaptec Supporting Ultra160 On IA-64 Linux More

Adaptec Supporting Ultra160 On IA-64 Linux

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  • Mark my words: IA64 will be Intel's biggest failure ever. It's already too late; their competitors have had 64-bit platforms available for years now, and have already gone through the transition annoyances to have mature reliable 64-bit computing options available. Nobody is sitting on their asses waiting for Intel to implement and ship Itanium. Anybody who genuinely cares about 64-bit computing went with Decompaq, Sun, SGI, and friends years ago and isn't about to look back.

    The only people excited about Itanium are the ones who think they want to run enntee on it, and they are bound for disappointment because it'll be at least a year before m$ can demo a working 64-bit enntee. Linux on IA64 will help, but it won't save them. People who want to run Linux on a 64-bit platform are already doing so and probably won't buy into the Intel hype. If Intel's 64-bit offering were substantially cheaper than others, they might claim this market anyway, in the same way and for the same reason as they claimed most of the 32-bit market. Alas, Itanium is looking at least as expensive as competing options, and the first versions are unlikely to match up in performance or scalability.

    And really, hype is all it is. The hard truth here is that Intel is between two and six years behind its competitors and is trying to make up for it with slick marketing hype. While Intel has called press conferences, their traditional RISC workstation competitors have marched on, crushing Intel's new processor in performance before it's even shipped. Within the next two to three years, we can expect to see more Alpha 21264s, UltraSPARC IIIs, MIPS R14k, and Itanium. As it looks, Itanium will be the weakest of the four. Ironically, they could probably have avoided this if they hadn't made the idiotic decision to ship Itanium with an x86 compatibility mode. That extra die space could have been used to take the performance lead away from their competitors. Instead, they've simply added support for an architecture that everyone agrees should have died 10 years ago.

    So let's drink one final toast to Intel. Here's to you for holding back the computing industry for 20 years. Farewell, you shall not be missed.

  • I'm pretty sure tux likes scooby snacks. That belly of his tells me he likes them a lot!


    _damnit_
  • Posting to the same story that you have moderated removes the moderation. Strangely enough he is still at +1 Offtopic though :).

    I do pity you however. They are gona lynch you in metamoderation :)
  • I mean, the prices for IA64 systems probably
    will be the same as or worse than an equiv
    Alpha system, and Alpha is a much cleaner
    design anyhow... What's the point in being
    excited about IA64?
  • Hmm. It should also be noted that mostly nobody is going to use an IA-64 desktop computer during the first months anyway.
  • The moderation is entirely undone once he has posted to the same story - it won't appear on the metamod page.

    --

  • If the only OS available for the first systems would be Linux?

    It would be almost as good if W2K will be available, but has to run ix x86 compatibility mode.

    I bet Redmond is pulling a whole bucketload of all nighters to prevent either of these scenarios. And we all know how much quality that provides :-)

    --
  • Hmmm, while this is somewhat boring news to those of us that run FreeBSD and have had Ultra 160 support for the new adaptech drivers since January, I must say I'm impressed with their 19160 board. While crippled in software under Windows, it isn't crippled on FreeBSD and runs like a bat out of ****. I got mine white box from MicroExpress for $160.00. Great price, and very competitive with all the other cards.

    BTW, the Linux driver is just a port of Justin Gibb's FreeBSD driver. Justin does good work, which is why I went for the 19160 board when I was putting together a system recently.
  • While this news is a little boring to me as a FreeBSD user (we've had support for the adaptech Ultra160 boards in FreeBSD since January), I do think it is cool that adaptec is supporting linux so openly. It is a shame that they don't mention that this Linux driver is just a simple port of Justin Gibb's FreeBSD driver.

    The adaptech 19160 with Justin's driver scream. And at about $160 for the white box version, this is a good, cheap, reliable FAST scsi card.

    Glad to see Adaptec is allowing Linux users in on the game too. Hate to see only FreeBSD folks benefit :-)
  • My understanding is that the Alpha port still exists internally. They're using it to build 64-bit Windows.

    The real problem is not that NT wasn't designed to be portable -- it's that NT was only designed to be portable to 32-bit archs. Microsoft had been promising a 64-bit port of NT4 for Alpha for years, and couldn't deliver.

    I agree that with 2000 running on i386 only, there's probably a huge temptation for hack programmers to shove some non-portable code in there. Hopefully Microsoft will show a bit of discipline here. (I like Sun's policy of shipping Solaris on i386 even though it's a money-loser. It ensures that they stuff is portable, and will probably save them tons of time and money in the long run.)
    --
  • I Wish gcc was as fast as ccc. But it isn't. I need fast float. Alpha has it. Compaq made it available for free to us on Linux. I am not complaining. I would guess that gcc will catch up. For now I would like to Thank Compaq for making ccc available to me on Alpha Linux for free. And, in kind, I am sure Compaq is thankfull for my purchases...

    Improving gcc Is probably enticing for the hardware manufactures - to sell their architecture. If I can get a 2x improvement in performance through hardware optimization in ccc then it is in their best interest to make gcc fast as possible on their architecture. I wish the whole distro was compiled with ccc's speed.
  • I grabbed Compaq's ccc compiler for Linux/Alpha just 2 days ago. It was indeed 2x faster float than what gcc could give. Integer performance will be 10 - 30% better. Get the Compaq Linux Alpha compiler Here. [digital.com]
  • It is unlikely that Intel will release a chip with out operating system support for it. It just doesnt make good sences finacialy. Now if Linux is the only one supporting it at the launch, that would definitly give linux a big boost as far as user base. But how long would it last. I cant see Microsoft letting that happen honestly.
  • Well at least we got both cygnus and SGI working on compilers, sgi had in mind a release of the source so at least we can hope for 'good enough' support.

    But I since we havent got the chip yet it must be quite hard to come up with some benchmarks or stuff...
  • Yeah right. They dont even have support for their existing products under Windows 2000. You have to use the generic Microsoft Driver. Can you say crash? Pete -- So I'm being a little pessimistic..
  • Do you have any links to IP-over-SCSI implementations? Sounds neat.
  • The whole point of all this is that Intel won't make the big release until MS are ready with win2k.
    -0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-0-
    Laptop006
    laptop006@netexecutive.com
    Vic, Australia
  • I'm all for more FLOPS and its great that Compaq has given us their compiler. I just meant to suggest that the true value of gcc is greater than its raw performance numbers, without it its hard to imagine what the Free Software movement would have looked like. To make gcc better one has to do it in the context of making other platforms better, which is why I didn't think that contributing in a real way would be interesting to a hardware vendor. They would rather give their platform an advantage, as Compaq has done with their compiler.

    You make a good point about having a whole distro compiled with a Compaq optimized compiler. That might be the carrot that causes them to submit a patch that has their improvements to gcc. Right now the linux kernel is tied to gcc and I can't count the number of times I've tried to use the vendor's optimized compiler to build some sourceware and given up in frustration and had it build with no problem with gcc. So making gnu/linux systems better overall might be what convinces Compaq its in its own interest to contribute to gcc, apparently they don't think that's the case now.
  • But can Compaq produce a compiler that beats gcc on 20+ architectures? Or even better, can Compaq help to improve gcc to reach that level of performance? Improving gcc is probably not as enticingly sexy to the vendors that are making noises around Free Software as improving Linux itself, so I would not expect Compaq, or the other big vendors to do that soon.

    That said, of course it would be great if gcc performed better. Cygnus has ported gcc to VLIW architectures before, so I would expect that will help. Also, hopefully now that Redhat has bought Cygnus some of that IPO money will go towards engineers working on improving gcc.

  • Here is where MS may have shot itself in the foot. Until recently (RC1 of 2000 or thereabouts) the NT based OS was compiled across multiple processor architecture - albeit only Alpha and Intel latterly. This gave a certain degree of architecture independence to most of the code that makes up the OS (barring things like HAL (obviously) and NTFS)

    Now that they have dumped the Alpha from the 2000 family, 2000 will, inevitiably, grow to be Intel 32 bit achitecture specific. So when the IA64 trundles along there will be a fearsome amount of work getting the codebase compatible. So it's going to be a bodge.

  • Since Adaptec charged an arm, leg, and/or a liver for SCSI host adapters as an expansion card, I had to resort to buying a motherboard with an integrated SCSI adapter (It's an Adaptec 2940U2W in an Asus P2B-S) for now. Someday, I'm going to get a new motherboard, but I might need to get a SCSI adapter as a PCI card from Symbios/LSI Logic [lsilogic.com]. Does anybody know if LSI Logic's Ultra2 and Ultra160 adapters is supported in Linux? Thanks a lot.

    I (heart, linked to an external RAID array and a couple of CD-ROM drives) SCSI.
    --


  • Unfortunatly, most systems running linux are not for high-performance environments. Wouldn't the time be better spent bring a real _server_ OS up to IA-64 spec?

    Are you saying that the average computer running Linux is a cheap Taiwanese motherboard and K6-2? That could very well be true. I've never seen a study or poll done. If people tend to avoid the x86 platform when building enterprise-class servers, it's not Linux's fault. :) Linux supports the 64 bit Alpha and UltraSPARC, as well. We're architecture-neutral.

    If we can support as much high-end server hardware as possible, I'm sure the kernel as a whole will prosper as a result of it. Linus would never accept a patch that broke every other architecture besides IA64.

    I don't think your comment is flamebait, but you could have worded it more gracefully.
  • You might want to put your e-mail address in a message when you ask a question that can be answered by e-mail.

    Yeah, the Symbios/LSI Logic cards are supported in Linux. You could have also grepped the kernel source, gone to the LSI web site, or run "make menuconfig".
  • Hah. I'll believe in Athlon server systems when I see them.

    Right now, the Athlon is a nice toy CPU. I agree with Michael Dell. It's great for enthusiasts, but it's not ready for the enterprise or server market yet. Not even sure it's ready for the mainstream market, yet. Have you read about the problems AMD motherboards have with the GeForce?
  • That's the truth.

    Intel has really bombed this time.

    BX forever. :)
  • Your adaptec 2920 is a bastard leftover from their acqusition of future domain or somebody. It has to be one of the only PCI scsi cards that uses PIO instead of DMA. In other word, no, don't even think about it ;-)

  • Are yoy sure? Don't forget AMD, they push Intel do a log of thing they don't whant to do.... like bring down IA-64 in the K8 space.
  • It's clear to me that the advantage in the second machine is 5 disk configuration not SCSI Bus.
    In my opinion it make sense to have a SCSI machine only if you need more disk that your ide channel(1 disk per channel). Take in mind that a Ide RAID + 18GBx2 disk cost less than one 9 GB SCSI disk, in Italy of course:). Look at promise site for benck(ok it's not the best source;).
  • I think that advantage of the second configuration is that you write the same amount of data on 4HD insted of 2. In my understand of the tecnology the advantage of RAID is that you can read and write from/to the (numer of disk-1) the parity is work that the cpu or controller have to do.
    1. I would like to know if you think thak the IDE RAID isn't an option.
    2. thare are banck that I can study about the argument
    I'm waiting for you ansver. Don't worry you aren't rude:)
  • More yummy hot hardware to play with at work under linux, it's really nice to see that no longer is linux fully supporting current and old hardware, but also *future* hardware, how much better can it get? =)

    ---
  • Come to think of it, if you stick a 64Bit processor in a 32 bit cluster, will it even work ?

    I don't know why it shouldn't. If I'm not mistaken Beowulf clusters exist are made up of independent computers conected via network connections. As long as your code can run the software you should be able to run a Beowulf.

    On the other haand, I could be just running my mouth, pretending I know something when in reality I have no idea what I'm doing.

    Jay


    -- polish ccs mirror [prawda.pl]
  • Dumbs everything down?

    What's wrong with that? It's not like all the APIs, command line and Scripting features are *GONE*.

    Just cause there's an easy way to do everything from the GUI now, doesn't mean you can't do it programmitically, scriptically or using command line tools.

    I think you a reality check.
  • You do realise that most drivers that come with windows are written by manufactueres, and then are verified, tested and signed by microsoft.

    And it's normally 3rd party drivers that cause system crashes. And I trust you've never even tried Windows 2000?
  • I accidentally just moderetated this down.... would someone PLEASE moderate this up....
  • This is a Really Smart Move(tm) for Adaptec because it appeals to the high end server market directly off the bat, the kind of market that would be their main customers for a while for the IA-64 AND Ultra160. Not many people will be running their Linux on Itanium chips at home at the beginning and the suits that will be running them will more than likely stuff the boxes into giant (pick your flavor here) server(s). Ultra160, coupled with the new chip AND an OS that has shown it's stability on other platforms, would be a perfect addition for serving up whatever data was needed in a timely manner.

  • So while we're on the SCSI/DMA issue, has anyone out there seen/played with/set up a RAID 0 DMA/66 box with fileserve performance super-tweaked? How much can you milk from it, how does it compare to SCSI solutions?
  • There is no doubt that the limiting factor is the bandwidth limitations not the limitations of our hard drives.

    Ok, so, Question. In the 75G Deskstar Article posted yesterday, a "maximum media data rate of 444 megabits per second (Mb/s)" is quoted. So what exactly does this mean again? Doesn't this mean that there's approx a 3:1 burst transfer rate bottleneck?

    Does anyone have the answer? Are the technological hurdles high? How is it that we have gigabit ethernet and yet drives can be three times as fast as their bus?

    When Oligarchy strikes, it's time to be a scab.

  • I wonder what would happen if I stuck an itanium to the end of my home-built beowulf cluster ?

    Come to think of it, if you stick a 64Bit processor in a 32 bit cluster, will it even work ?

    With linux as the big-boy OS here for a change, I'll bet were gonna be seeing a lot of comercial 64Bit itanium based beowulf clusters. Just imagine how much phun you could have with one of those. Even if you only cluster 4 processors.
    Now all we need is for someone to build a version of the dumb 3D engin with support for multiprocessing.
    So I can play DOOM supercomputer style.

  • There is no doubt that the limiting factor is the bandwidth limitations not the limitations of our hard drives. I mean we operate off of a T1 and 80Mbits/sec is more than fast enough for us. However, for someone who needs a high performance workstation I could see the advantages.


    Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
    NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
    www.npsis.com [npsis.com]

  • I would be suprised if IDE ever surplants SCSI for servers, it just isn't designed for it - case in point, running MS SQL server (6.5) on NT Server 4, which of these two machines do you think performed best:

    P2 350MHz, 128Mb RAM, 2 x 6 Gb IDE DMA/33 (striped)

    Pentium 166MHz, 80Mb RAM, 5 x 2Gb Wide SCSI (striped w/parity)

    I'll give you a clue, the faster machine with more RAM ran like a total dog whenever any major database work was done.

  • Are you seriously suggesting that having extra disks made up for less RAM and processor speed - please bear in mind the second array was using a PARITY striped disk, which means for every write it had to update the parity as well. If you examine your RAID information, striping with parity SLOWS disks. Using arrays generally does not speed up disk throughput, but provides redundancy for failure.

    I do not wish to be rude, but it seems clear you do not understand the technology. The advantage in the second machine is that SCSI is designed for multi-tasking (elevator seeks, scatter-gather, etc.) and IDE has NONE of these. There is a reason why a SCSI controllor is more expensive than an IDE one, it has in built intelligence, and effectively creates a storage network on a seperate bus, rather than expecting the host computer to control everything.

  • The advantage of RAID is often when reading data, not when writing - reads are served by several disks and can be faster, writes require extra parity information, and are slower

    IDE RAID is certainly an option, although not for high end systems (for the same reasons, no elevator seeks etc). Anywhere you want reliability, RAID is useful, and the underlying disk technology is irrelevant. I would rather have IDE RAID 5 than plain IDE, or even plain SCSI, where my data is important. I notice that you can get a SCSI RAID device that internally uses IDE disks (i.e it has a SCSI interface to the computer, but the disks and internal controllers are IDE) - much cheaper than a similar all SCSI system.

  • This is nothing new. Remember it was many YEARS after the release of the 386 MS came out with a version of Windows that used any 32bit features. For those who don't remember it was Windows 3.1 and the features were performance tweaks for virtual memory. It would still run on a 286 if you knew how to detune the setup.

    It did take MS a few years to take advantage of special 386 modes. Quarterdeck's Desqview/Qemm and Qualitas' 386MAX beat them to the punch by a large margin, and made it clear to even the average DOS user that MS was shipping things that barely deserved the title "Operating System". I consider NT to be the real first attempt, since previous versions didn't do much with the capabilities of the 386 -- even Win98 doesn't do much to isolate potentially errant processes.

    Nit: Windows 386 (v.2.11??) required a 386 and did have some basic DOS VM support. It didn't have DPMI support, though, so running other 386-aware programs was verboten.

    Windows 386 was, of course, horrid compaired to Desqview though it did pre-date Win 3.1x.

  • Unfortunatly, most systems running linux are not for high-performance environments...

    Please define "high-performance." Standing alone, this comment may appear at first glance to be flamebait.

    "Wouldn't the time be better spent bring a real _server_ OS up to IA-64 spec?"

    To what end? So that high-end hardware becomes useable only by "high-end" (READ: rediculously expensive) OS users? Umm...or would the time perhaps be better spent bringing high-performance features to Linux? As a sysadmin who has worked with both Linux and some of those other "real _server_ OS"'s you speak of, I'd much rather see Linux brought up to the level of Solaris and some of the other enterprise-level, high-performance OS's out there.

    I'd just rather deal with Linux on a daily basis. I've learned it's a much more pleasant experience than wrangling with some of the commercial UNIX offerings.

    I'm glad to see more development of this nature. Congrats to Adaptec for taking this first, small step in the right direction. Next step: Open-source drivers, open hardware and development specs.
  • Back then, it was the desktop, and there was no competition.

    Right now, this is for servers, M$ is trying to make W2K the be-all, and there's some fierce competition. This will be a real black eye for M$ marketing. It will put paid to a lt of their boasting as to being ready for the enterprise server market. It will be DELICIOUS!

    --
  • I wonder if gcc is up to the task for compiling programs for IA64.
    Compaq is saying that its compilers is generating code whichs runs 2 times faster than code generated by gcc.
    For the Alpha, a chip for which code generation is much more easier than the IA64 (VLIW compilers are complicated beasts!).
    So Linux will run first on the IA64, yes, but will it have good performances ? I'm not sure at all.

    Does anyone have more informations ?
  • Ya, but dont forget about the problems with the i820 and i840 chip sets. Also lets not forget the poor access time of the Rambus. I guess it comes down to BX boards and chips being the only thing to get if you REALLY want stability.
  • Well, this comes to ~50-55 MBs xfer rate from the drive media to the cache on the drive... of course you can burst from the 2MB cache at up to bus speed (more or less), and if you are on a slower bus (plain old UW, etc) you could do a non-cached burst... that being said, if all you are doing is serving static files, then - yeah, the bottleneck isn't the drive most of the time, but if the drive has to do a lok of seeks, and collect db records from many areas of the disk (assuming you don't use an array or other method of speed-up) then your drive won't be bursting at full rate, since it will disconnect until the data is ready. This can then be the bottleneck, regardless of bus speed... seek times kill. Then you actually have to manipulate the data before you send it out, but that's usally an order of magnitude or three less than the disk access...
    drive seek: 10^-3
    CPU cycle: 10^-9 (so even 100 cycles is still *way* faster than a disk access

  • Another good question: How many months until ATA 200? The IBM 75G Deskstar article talks about ATA 100 support. Yeah, SCSI has it's place, yeah it has low CPU over head, etc, but is adaptec not getting a little worried? Can you imagine the situation if ATA transfer rates exceed SCSI? SCSI drives are targeted for server market, which makes their prices "unnaturally" high (inelastic demand) but at some point might not it become cheaper to build, say, a HD subsystem blackbox of ATA drives with it's own CPU, microkernel feeding a host through gigabit ethernet or something? If the software tools were in place, you might get a full ATA host with the disk subsystems priced at half the cost of SCSI flavor.

    Take home prophecy: Linux (i.e. geeks) kill the SCSI oligarchy.

    Go Geeks Go

  • Unfortunatly, most systems running linux are not for high-performance environments. Wouldn't the time be better spent bring a real _server_ OS up to IA-64 spec?
  • It seems to me that this is just a tacit admission by a major hardware manufacturer that Linux is well ahead of Doze, Solaris and any other OSes that are being developed for IA64. Based on Microsoft's previous record, we might see a 64 bit IA64 windows sometime in 2002, and Solaris is for the time being on hold, after a rather childish slagging match between Intel and Sun with each one claiming that the other was not pulling their weight by doing a fair share of the porting effort. As a result, when Itanium arrives, there will be only one viable choice - Linux. So if you are a hardware manufacturer that would like to be able to take advantage of the new architecture - then you can wait 2 years for MS, or you can just bite the bullet (jump on the bandwagon?) now. It's a question of simple, obvious business sense.

  • They had no choice (Score:3)

    by Forge ( 2456 ) <kevinforge.gmail@com> on Thursday March 16, 2000 @09:39PM (#1196369) Homepage Journal
    This just indicates where Linux is in the IA64 marketplace. Way out ahead for those who just returned from Vega.

    Adaptec has high bandwidth Hard drive controllers to sell on the x86 market. They believe iNTEL's claim that this will be Itanium in just a few short months. Therefore they must make this available for Itanium and support it as much as possible.

    Since there is only one complete OS that's correctly capable of doing real work on Itanium today; they really have no choice. See this story for details about Turbo Linux on Itanium. [linuxtoday.com] This isn't just a kernel or a compiler but a full, functional Linux distribution. The closest thing anyone has to a Linux distribution ( in terms of included Apps ) is Microsoft's "Back Office suite".

  • This is nothing new. Remember it was many YEARS after the release of the 386 MS came out with a version of Windows that used any 32bit features. For those who don't remember it was Windows 3.1 and the features were performance tweaks for virtual memory. It would still run on a 286 if you knew how to detune the setup.

    All the apps for the platform were 16 bit however. It wasn't until yet more years that they actually released a 32 bit OS. It was Windows NT and though it had some 16 Bit stuff in there it qualified as a 32 bit OS even in early release.

    MS will sell a 32 bit OS or even that hybrid 16/32 bit Win98 or WinME on Itanium and the market will lap it up. Perhaps not as quickly or in the volumes that Linux will enjoy but enough to be noticed.

    As for Monterey. I have herd a lot of posturing from the people producing it and some talk from people who promise to ship it on boxes but I have yet to here customers who say "We want to use Monterey on Itanium to run our business". Why would they ? It's a compliantly unknown quantity. In the Jargon file it qualifies as Vaporware. I.e. Nobody has seen even an Alpha build.
  • What good is a fast transfer rate if you can only hang two devices off it anyhow? Adaptec won't be worried until IDE doesn't limit you to 2 drives on a 14" cable. I mean, even given "theoretical" limits approaching 30MB/sec for some fast drives, the fast is that under real world conditions you'll have difficulty pulling much more than 10MB/sec. Seems kindof like putting racing wheels on a Yugo: the wheels aren't what makes the car go faster, although if you have the speed, they help.
  • Well, that's partially Intel's fault. They dropped the 386 on the market, and didn't do any evangalism to make sure that software would ship for it. For example, OS/2 1.0 shipped after the first i386 PCs, but it was designed to run on the 286.

    Intel didn't make the same mistake this time. They have been evangalizing the OS developers like crazy. "64-bit NT will ship the same day as Merced" has been a mantra from MS and Intel for *years*. And Intel is making sure that they're not riding Microsoft's back into the datacenter -- hence IBM/SCO Monterey and IA64 Linux. They also pushed hard for Solaris/IA64 and Tru64/IA64, but failed.

    There's lots of idle speculation that Windows 2000/IA64 will be a 'hybrid' 64/32 bit beast. Microsoft says it won't be. We'll just have to wait and see, but with $Billons, I can't imagine that MS would be that stupid. Linux would just kick their ass in this market. I'd recommend waiting and seeing until the product ships. (Admittedly, the extremely poor i386 transition provides some historical justification for the speculation.)

    --
  • Recently, I've been playing with softraid under linux using 4 x 8 Gb IDE disks. As long as you use only one disk per controller, things are great! I get 25 Mb/s using this cheap setup. Results: here [warande.uu.nl]. UDMA support makes a big difference when using Softraid! Also, "mke2fs -b 4096 -R stride=4 /dev/md0" helped me alot!

    As for SCSI comparison, my Adaptec 2920 does only 10 Mb/s; need I try? ;)

  • Ultra 160/m - not needed for the desktop anyway. (Score:4)

    by paled ( 22916 ) on Thursday March 16, 2000 @09:32PM (#1196374)
    Even with a pair of Quantum Atlas V drives (27 MB/sec write rate), I doubt that any real performance gains will be measured running at 160 MB/sec burst rate over 80 MB/sec (U2W).
    Now, when you've got a RAID 0 stripe 4 drives deep, that might show some potential for improvement.

    So this one is definitely for the server room.

    Those new IBM drives with up to a 16 MB cache - if you have 16 MB cache on each drive, plus 64 MB cache on the RAID controller, then the 80 MB/sec is potentially rate-limiting.

    So - how many months until Ultra 4 320/m SCSI?

    Paul

  • Feh. Adaptec is full of talk (Score:4)

    by noop ( 72121 ) on Friday March 17, 2000 @12:12AM (#1196375)
    This is nonsense. Adaptec has this all backwards. They should be writing drivers for linux now. Or they should at least do a better job of helping developers work with their cards. The linux aic7xxx driver runs basically every newer adaptec card, and some on-motherboard chipsets. Currently it doesn't support target mode. Target mode is needed to run IP-over-SCSI (Rfc 2143). I and others have repeatedly emailed and called adaptec, attempting to get documentation so we could work on it. Adaptec was no help.

    They should think about becoming more like Advansys [advansys.com] who actually provide kernel tuning advice.
    Or perhaps Symbios [symbios.com] who have programming guides and real datasheets [lsilogic.com] for much of their stuff.
    free login required [symbios.com]
    Basically Adaptec should spend some of it's time thinking about the customer now, not the the customer in a year that they are trying to create.
    --

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