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From: terry@spcvxb.spc.edu (Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr.)
Subject: Re: Newer SCSI disk methods and BSDI support...
Nntp-Posting-Host: spcvxa.spc.edu
References: <323961DB.B54@mvp.net>
Sender: news@spcuna.spc.edu (Network News)
Organization: St. Peter's College, US
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 1996 21:59:09 GMT
Message-ID: <1996Sep13.175909.1@spcvxb.spc.edu>
Lines: 39
In article <323961DB.B54@mvp.net>, David Buttrick <debut@mvp.net> writes:
> Is fast wide SCSI II supported by BSDI 2.1.5???
Not sure what you mean by "BSDI 2.1.5" - as far as I know, 2.1 is the latest
shipping version. Are you perhaps talking about some other BSD release, like
FreeBSD? If so, what follows doesn't apply to you...
> I realize that in general scsi receives commands, and then it is up to
> the controller and disk to perform them, but people around here insist
> that fast/wide SCSI II is unsupported...
Fast SCSI 2 is supported on any controller that is capable of operating
in that mode (as long as the controller has a BSD/OS driver). Wide mode is
a bit different - on the BusLogic wide controllers (like the BT-958) it
works with the restriction that the OS will only "see" drives on the first
8 target ID's. So, if you had a wide BusLogic controller at ID7 and drives
at ID's 0, 1, and 12, only the drives at 0 and 1 would be detected, but they
would run in wide mode. I have added the additional detection logic to the
bha driver to support the high ID targets and it should appear in a future
BSD/OS release, along with other changes by both BSDI and myself. [And no,
please don't ask me for patches - the source has diverged way too much for
patches to work on vanilla 2.1.]
Wide mode on non-BusLogic controllers appears to require additional work
in the driver (this is certainly true for the NCR cards and I'm pretty sure
it's true for the Adaptec ones as well). This is where the "wide drives run
in narrow mode" note in the manual comes from.
> We have several spare fast/wide drives lying around, and I want to use
> one to serve our user home pages off my web server.
Wide doesn't buy you a lot if you've got a single drive - even narrow
fast SCSI is faster than a single drive. The advantage is when you attach
multiple drives, or SCSI RAM disks, RAID boxes, etc. You don't say what
controller you have, but if it's a BusLogic you're all set.
Terry Kennedy Operations Manager, Academic Computing
terry@spcvxa.spc.edu St. Peter's College, Jersey City, NJ USA
+1 201 915 9381 (voice) +1 201 435-3662 (FAX)