km@mathcs.emory.edu (Ken Mandelberg) (02/02/91)
The price of reasonably fast SCSI drives has really come down. 1.2GB drives are well under $3K. However, the preferred drive interface on Sun's 490 servers is IPI-2, and on that platform the IPI driver and interface is much higher in performance than Sun's scsi. So far, I haven't seen any IPI drives that compete in cost with the SCSI. The Seagate 8" Saber drives which Sun uses cost twice as much as the low cost 5.25" SCSI's. These Sabers come in IPI,SCSI, and SMD versions all of which are expensive. Has anyone seen any sign of lower cost IPI-2 drives that I missed? In particular are there any 5.25" IPI-2 drives? -- Ken Mandelberg | km@mathcs.emory.edu PREFERRED Emory University | {rutgers,gatech}!emory!km UUCP Dept of Math and CS | km@emory.bitnet NON-DOMAIN BITNET Atlanta, GA 30322 | Phone: Voice (404) 727-7963, FAX 727-5611
pfh@craycos.com (Peter Hill) (02/02/91)
> Has anyone seen any sign of lower cost IPI-2 drives that I missed? In > particular are there any 5.25" IPI-2 drives? Seagate has one in their current catalog. I don't know about price or availability. It is the ST41201K Elite 1, which is a 1200 Mbyte (unformatted) 5.25" full-height drive with dual-port IPI-2 interface. You don't have to have a Sun-4/400 series machine to use IPI disks, by the way. We have a Xylogics SV7890 dual-channel controller in a Sun-4/280S with 12 (soon 16) Seagate two-head-parallel 8" Sabres. So far, so good. (Caution: the SV7890 doesn't support full IPI cable length spec. We had to get an extra set of short cables to stay within their 50' limitation.) -- ___________________________________________________________________________ Peter Hill pfh@craycos.com +1 719 540 4259 Cray Computer Corporation, 1110 Bayfield Drive, Colorado Springs, CO 80906