On Mon, 12 Oct 1998, Mrpeabody wrote: > I'm looking to add a scsi hard drive and controller to my system which > currently uses an ide drive. What is a good controller and drive to > buy? Does only the controller matter or does the type of hard drive I > get matter to? > -jeff >
I have two Linux machines, both with SCSI. At home I bought a Mylex (formerly Buslogic) on the recommendations of this list. It seems well supported by the Linux kernel and I've had no problems with it. At work, I was given an Adaptec 2940. It seems less well supported by the Linux kernel. I'm now running kernel version 2.0.30, not the latest released into the stable distribution, because when I upgraded to Debian 2.0 and tried to use the version of the kernel, it didn't work with the Adaptec SCSI board. Hopefully, the Adaptec device driver will improve in the later kernels. Other than that, the Adaptec has been very reliable. Adaptec seems to have the lion's share of the PC SCSI adapter market. All of my Windows friends seem to think that no other companies make SCSI boards for PCs. Others on this list have stated that Adaptec is notorious for not supporting the "other than Windows" market, in terms of info that is needed by the developers of device drivers in the kernel. Other SCSI board manufacturers, like Mylex, actively support other OSs. So I decided to buy a Mylex instead of the Adaptec for that reason. As far as hard drives go, my opinion is that most of the brands are similar in quality. I know of drives from all brands that have failed at one time or another. I tend to go with the "5 year warrenty" drives believing them to be a little better, but I'm sure there are plenty of others out there that bought the cheapest drive they could find and have gotten great service from it.
