Subject: Re: SCSI Adapter Support
From: Bob Beaton (bob@keyengine.com)
Date: Fri Nov 23 2001 - 19:51:47 MST
Charlie,
Thanks for the very helpful information. Hopefully, someone experienced with
the Nubus SCSI cards will offer some comments too.
As for the 8500 SCSI, the Apple support site indicates that the internal bus
runs fast but not wide at 10 Mb/s, whereas the external bus runs at 5 Mb/s.
So I'm thinking that any YDL-compatible fast-n-wide/ultra SCSI card will be
a step up. I'm sure someone will let me know if I'm wrong here.
And you right about the CPU bottleneck. However, I've got a bunch of large
data matrices to process. While CPU speed is an issue, my data needs to get
shuffled on and off disk during processing (i.e., they're too large to hold
in RAM). So, I'm thinking that some improvement would be gained with faster
disk I/O; although I'd love to get one of those G3 Sonnett cards working
under YDL (I've got a new 500 MHz card but it's incompatible despite the
successes reported by others using older Sonnett cards) .
Thanks again!
Bob
> From: Charlie Watts <cewatts@frontier.net>
> Reply-To: yellowdog-general@lists.yellowdoglinux.com
> Date: Fri, 23 Nov 2001 18:51:39 -0700 (MST)
> To: "yellowdog-general@lists.yellowdoglinux.com"
> <yellowdog-general@lists.yellowdoglinux.com>
> Subject: Re: SCSI Adapter Support
>
> On Fri, 23 Nov 2001, Bob Beaton wrote:
>
>> I've got YDL 2.1 running on some older PowerMacs (7100s and 8500s),
>> which I would like to cluster for some big number-crunching tasks. I'm
>> trying to decide how to upgrade the SCSI disk systems in these
>> machines, since I anticipate needing to do a lot of disk I/O.
>>
>> Does YDL support accelerated SCSI cards? I'm particularly interested
>> in the faster SCSI cards for my Nubus machines, such as the FWB
>> JackHammer or ATTO Silicon Express IV. But I'd also like to know if
>> the newer PCI SCSI cards are supported, such as the Adaptec
>> PowerDomain 39160, 29160, 29160N, and 2930 cards.
>
> I don't know about the FWB or ATTO cards ... but the Adaptec cards should
> be supported. If you "strings" the default kernel you see references to
> the Adaptec 29160, 29160N, and 2930 cards. 29160N's are cheap and good.
>
> I'm not sure what point a 2930 would be, at least not in an 8500. Didn't
> the 8500's have fast/wide anyway? Perhaps not.
>
> The nice part about the Adaptec cards is that you can get them with Mac
> Bioses and be able to boot off of them. If you are going to boot from an
> internal disk, you can use almost any PCI SCSI card - I like the
> LSI/NCR/Symbios-based cards myself. Cheap and boring.
>
> I doubt that the 29160's are worth it, either ... I don't think the PCI in
> those machines will keep up with an U160 disk at full tilt anyway. And are
> you -sure- that disk I/O is going to be your bottleneck? You say you're
> doing number-crunching ... any moderate amount of processing will make the
> CPU the bottleneck.
>
> Interested in your experiences and decisions ...
>
> --
> Charlie Watts
> cewatts@frontier.net
> Frontier Internet, Inc.
> http://www.frontier.net/
>
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