Promise UDMA66 to Fasttrack RAID

[moreau]

cool.


do you know, if your card is a "real" controller-based card? What about cache?

I'm always interested in scsi alternatives. Adaptec is a nice company, don't get me wrong. But, you pay a premium for the name. Symbios is an alternative, but not exaclty cheap.

Mylex is new to me. I notice their prices go up quickly from this product, which is 'narrow scsi'. Plus, the adaptec ide card is RAID 5, whereas your LW card is 0 or 1, like my promise.

Anyway, I like the sound of your card. Kudos from me to anyone who is willing to make a low cost SCSI 'solution'. At any rate, I stand by my assertion that SCSI is a premium product. IDE is a low cost solution, whose benefits have caught up substantially to SCSI, but are still slightly behind, IMO.

[xortam]

moreau, The LW supports the Wide bus (thus the "W" in the name, 40 MB/s Wide Ultra). The DW supports two channels of Wide Ultra SCSI but requires VHD cables which are very expensive and hard to find.
You'll have to explain what you mean by 'a "real" controller-based card'. I think you'll be able to find your answers in the documentation on their web-site which includes the full manual with specs.
I run RAID 0 to maximize my throughput w/o reducing my storage capacity: This fits my needs for this workstation. I can live with any downtime associated with using backups to restore lost data. Full RAID support will cost you much more and may not add anything for your needs.
Mylex and Buslogic have been around at least since the introduction of the EISA bus. They've always been well respected.
I used an AMI EISA SCSI caching controller on my old 486 system. They can be troublesome to bootstrap under various OSs. Caching controllers have always been very hard to find. I don't know what the current offerings are but I thought I saw that Adaptec did finally offer one (after scoffing them for so long). Another factor for me was that Adaptec, besides being way overpriced, didn't support RAID on Win98. The Mylex product has excellent platform support which covered all of my needs. You should have seen the looks I got trying to track this solution down; everyone's only accustomed to selling RAID into server environments.

[moreau]

My apologies. I was looking at the LT data sheet.

Still, I think you misunderstand me. I was rather impressed by the mylex product line.

As far as a 'real' controller based card, I mean one that is a true processor based controller, that offloads read/write duties from the CPU.
IDE cards tend not to use this, while SCSI, in general, does.
As for cache, my promise IDE card has none. It is up to the drives to buffer data.


In the end, I think you and I are actuall saying the same thing. There are good SCSI RAID solutions available for the money that Adaptec is asking for their IDE line.

I know for me, I bought the IDE version for the cost (I converted the U66 and only spent $50), which is much lower than any of the SCSI cards I knew of, though admittedly I hadn't seen your Mylex card at that point.