RAID Setup Assistance

[Chong Yu Meng]

Kurt Wall wrote:

>In a 1.5K blaze of typing glory, Net Llama! wrote:
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>>On 01/19/04 17:01, Kurt Wall wrote:
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>>>The interesting thing: Ctrl+A brought up the SCSI BIOS, but the attached
>>>disks were not detected. Only the SCSI controller. I presume this is
>>>because the SCSI controller is situated on the RAID controller, but I
>>>honestly don't know, now having cracked the thing open yet.
>>>
>>>Alt+M opened the RAID BIOS, but there was nothing there that suggested
>>>I could reset anything so, failing that, I left everything as it was.
>>>It isn't broken, so I don't need to "fix" it.
>>>      
>>>
>>ALT-R is what gets you into the Mylex RAID configuration utility.
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Hi Kurt !

Now that you mention it, I seem to recall some differences that were 
mentioned to me many years back, when I was still working with hardware. 
In 1996-1997 I was working for a company that was a reseller of DPT SCSI 
and RAID cards. The main competitor back then was Mylex because it was 
used in IBM servers. Adaptec was not considered much of a threat, as 
they were mostly in the SCSI market then (how ironic !).

Anyway, the selling point for the DPT cards were : its superior 
technology (the ability to do fast reads AND writes because of on-board 
cache memory), and user-friendly utilities (i.e. Storage Manager) that 
made setting up RAID a  snap.

DPT SCSI cards could be converted into RAID cards through the addition 
of a card expansion module -- which was why I assumed that the SCSI BIOS 
and RAID BIOS were equivalent. Probably this is not the case for Mylex. 
You probably should not need to tinker with the hardware in any way 
either. I'm thinking that probably you'd need the manual, and you're 
probably missing a utilities diskette.

At least your current setup works, but no harm in knowing a little more 
about the card, eh? I'd help you find the information you may need, but 
we are only 2 days away from the Lunar New Year -- a major event in the 
Chinese calendar where we have to clean the house, pay our debts, buy 
new clothes, etc., so I'm going to be pretty busy.

Regards,
pascal chong