dnb@fltk.UUCP (David Buonomo) (10/13/90)
After about a week of comtemplating the various options available for a disk drive under ISC 2.2, I've decided on a Connor CP3200 200MB SCSI drive. I still have reservations about this decision due to this drive having a 20,000 hour MTBF. Should I be concerned? I could also use some advice on selecting a controller. Since it's SCSI, I believe I'm limited to Adaptec or Future Domain. Are there any controllers I should stay away from? I've not heard much about Future Domain; any suggestions? I'd like to hear from others about their experiences (good or bad) with any drive/controller combination. Thanks in advance for any insight. If warranted, I'll post a summary of responses. Dave Buonomo ...!uunet!fltk!dnb
cpcahil@virtech.uucp (Conor P. Cahill) (10/14/90)
In article <682@fltk.UUCP> dnb@fltk.UUCP (David Buonomo) writes: >drive. I still have reservations about this decision due to this drive >having a 20,000 hour MTBF. Should I be concerned? This sounds low. If you run your system 24 hrs a day, you can expect to have a drive failure within 3 years (1,000 days or so). I couldn't tell you what the MTBF is for the drives that I am using so I can't say how this compares to other drives. Three years can be considered a long time in the pc-unix industry (you will probably replace the drive by than anyway) so it may be no big deal. >I could also use some advice on selecting a controller. Since it's SCSI, >I believe I'm limited to Adaptec or Future Domain. Are there any controllers >I should stay away from? I've not heard much about Future Domain; any >suggestions? The Adapted (and the Bustek - which is an Adaptec look-alike) will run in bus-master mode and burst data across the bus (yes, it will even do that on an ISA bus). This gives them better performance than the Future domain controller. However, not all mother boards will accept bus master cards (we have two systems that had all kinds of problems with the Adaptec and bustek controllers before we gave up on them). The future domain, while using programmed io still has pretty good performance. -- Conor P. Cahill (703)430-9247 Virtual Technologies, Inc., uunet!virtech!cpcahil 46030 Manekin Plaza, Suite 160 Sterling, VA 22170