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Multi SCSI drives as one

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tcg23

Registered
Joined
May 2, 2003
Location
Virginia
I have 5 Ultra2 SCSI Drives, each 2.1gig.
I will be running them off of an Adaptec 2940UW.
The controller supports 50-pin Ultra and 68-pin UW connections.
I will be running UNIX off of it, but my question is: is there a way to setup all the drives as one?
I will need some partitions larger than 2.1gig.
I think RAID JBOD would be the best way to do it, but I don't think the SCSI controller has RAID on it.

What can I do?
Is there a way in the SCSIselect BIOS to setup multi drives as one logical drive?
I could do software RAID but it is dependant upon the CPU, which I don't like.

All feedback appreciated!
-TheComputerGuy23
 
It's probably not worth a lot of time and effort. Narrow drives are SLOW, at that size you'll be lucky if they're 5400RPM, and a 2940UW will only sync at 20MB/s on the narrow channel. Software RAID would be the only way to set up a RAID-0 array and it will not boot. Processor loading wouldn't be greatly significant. I'd worry much more about power consumption and an array that runs just a little better than PIO mode. You could get a much better U2W RAID card on Ebay for low cost and a couple of significantly sized U2W 10K RPM drives for almost a song and have a much faster, more reliable, and less power hungry array, Or do the sensible thing and simply add another IDE drive and controller(if necessary).
 
Software raid should be fine. JBOD would eat a negligable amount of cpu.

What cpu and what Unix are you talking about using?
 
This is going to be in my new pc, I'm not using the SCSI drives because of the performance.
They are 2.1gig 5400rpm drives, I got the controller card for 20 bucks.
I have the room in the case I am going to buy, I want to dualboot windows and UNIX.
Windows from the IDE drive and UNIX from the SCSI drives.

I'd be running FreeBSD, 'vinum' is the only way that I know to do it in FreeBSD.
If I just go with each drive as is, I can boot from the SCSI drives.

Proccessor speed will be 2.6Ghz P4C.

What do you think?
-TheComputerGuy23
 
I've used Vinum in FreeBSD to make a jbod out of a couple 20gb drives in a dual PPro200, didn't notice any performance degredation. Vinum itself is a little annoying to figure out, their Vinum docs (which are now copied into the handbook I believe) didn't really detail how to do a jbod, they just went over striping and mirroring and raid5.

I don't know if you can run root off of a vinum volume either.. I wouldn't be surprised if you could, though.
 
Thanks, VINUM is was was reccomeneded, just wanted to see if there was another way.
I appreciate it,
-TheComputerGuy23
 
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