[tcg23]

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

[Xaotic]

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).

[XWRed1]

Software raid should be fine. JBOD would eat a negligable amount of cpu.

What cpu and what Unix are you talking about using?

[tcg23]

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

[XWRed1]

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.

[tcg23]

Thanks, VINUM is was was reccomeneded, just wanted to see if there was another way.
I appreciate it,
-TheComputerGuy23