SUMMARY: 36Gb drives and enterprise 2

From: Jeff.Howard@agso.gov.au
Date: Mon Nov 01 1999 - 00:41:55 CST


Hi sun-managers,

I had 5 responses to this inquiry (the original message is below). Nobody
had a problem with
disks as such, although a couple raised performance as an issue: using RAID
disk rather than
big disks. In this instance, size was what counted not performance, although
YMMV.
The comment about 50Gb disks which was included in a response tweaked our
interest
and we have ended up buying a couple of these.

To those that responded, thanks for taking the time. I have appended all the
responses below FYI.

Cheers, Jeff

------------------ Original Query
follows---------------------------------------

From: Jeff.Howard@agso.gov.au
Sent: Monday, 25 October 1999 12:27
To: sun-managers@sunmanagers.ececs.uc.edu
Cc: Rifat.Mohsin@agso.gov.au
Subject: 36Gb drives and enterprise 2

Hi all,

We are looking at moving to the use of 36Gb drives on a Solaris 2.6, Ultra
enterprise 2 system. We have been given quotes on IBM drives, but any
comments on other manufacturers would be welcome.

I'm after comments about reliability - good and bad experiences e.g. "had no
trouble with 10 installed 6 months ago" or "we bought 10 six months ago and
have had to replace them all since". Also, the target platform is 2.6 so any
issues relating to that particular platform would be of interest.

If you have any interesting experiences with 36Gb drives that don't relate
directly to enterprise2/Solaris 2.6 but still concern "sun" managers, I'd
probably still be interested in them if you care to take the time to type it
in.

As usual, I'll bounce a summary back to the list of any information I
gather.

---
Cheers, Jeff

------------------------Actual responses follow--------------------------------------------------------

From: Joe Garbarino [jgarb@erim-int.com] Sent: Monday, 25 October 1999 22:39 To: Jeff.Howard@agso.gov.au Subject: Re: 36Gb drives and enterprise 2

Hi. We have some of the IBM 36GB LVD drives, they're pretty new, so you probably won't find anyone that's had them for very long. We've got about 5, had 'em for about 3 months, they seem to perform well. The only odd thing we've noticed about them is that it takes a long time to do a newfs (compared to Seagate drives, which is what we have a lot of).

Recently we've been purchasing Seagate Barracuda-50 50GB LVD drives, they seem equivalent to the IBM 36GB drives, and they newfs a heck of a lot faster (plus they're larger). Again, we haven't really had enough time with these to determine anything about longevity type issues, but we've had Seagate for a long time, and overall have been fairly pleased. We haven't replaced any of either drive.

As far as OS goes, we're running them on Antares LVD controllers (with their glm2 driver) on Ultra Enterprise systems running Solaris V2.6 and V7. We also have some on Ultra-60s.

Joe Garbarino jgarb@erim-int.com Veridian - ERIM International

From: Haydee Y. Ching [haydee@adtex.com.ph] Sent: Monday, 25 October 1999 17:19 To: Jeff.Howard@agso.gov.au Subject: Re: 36Gb drives and enterprise 2

how about ADTX Raid products? please refer to http://www.adtx.co.jp good luck! -haydee : )

From: kevin@joltin.com Sent: Monday, 25 October 1999 16:24 To: Jeff.Howard@agso.gov.au Subject: Re: 36Gb drives and enterprise 2

nothing on the drives in particular, but you should think about what you put on them. Exploring FS layout and things like VxFS is probably a good idea. Why 36GB and not a smaller disk to get more spindles?

I guess my comments would be about the performance expected here.

l & h, kev --------------- We have been using 36 gb disks for over a year with no problems. I have found the most resonable place for purchasing these to be American Computers and Engineers , they offer a 5 year replacement warranty that you happily wont need. Also their pricing and customer service supprised me and does to this day. I believe their number is 310-820-8998.

Jerry Weber [gldw@lanl.gov] --------------- Not 36GB, but may be of interest to others. We are still investigating problems with latest 18GB IBM LVD drives (Ultrastar 18LZX = DMVS318350LC, Firmware 0100; "27JUN99 18D OEM") that are invisible(!) to the internal Sun Fast-Wide SCSI controllers built-in to SPARCstation-20 and Ultra-1. Both the distributor (transtec) and IBM TechSupport couldn't help yet. Replacement drive behaves the same. Anyone?

Kind regards, Thomas

-- Thomas Anders <anders@hmi.de> Hahn-Meitner-Institut Berlin, Germany



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