OT: Unix stutter

[John Esak]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Wiltsie [mailto:swiltsie at micro-mui.com]
> Sent: Saturday, September 11, 2004 3:54 PM
> To: john at valar.com
> Subject: Re: OT: Unix stutter
>
>
> John,
>
> Sorry I hadn't had time to send you this idea until today.
>
> Do you have your tape drive on the same SCSI bus as the hard drive(s)?  If
> so, even though it may be on a separate channel, you may be seeing the
> pauses because of a SCSI bus reset or timing issue.  I know that in the
> Windows server world, and I have been told this by Tandberg and
> Exabyte tech
> support, the SCSI tape drive MUST be on a separate SCSI card - not just a
> separate channel - in order for Backup Exec (for example) to work
> properly.
> I have taken to installing an AHA-2940 or similar in all Windows
> servers and
> attaching only the tape drive to this card.  This has worked
> great compared
> to when I was using the built-in dual channel controller on the Intel main
> boards in all my customers servers.
>
> I realize you are talking about Unix here but I thought this may
> be of some
> help.  You probably have a 2940 card laying around somewhere and
> it wouldn't
> take much time to set this up as a test.
>
> Just a thought,
> Steve Wiltsie
> microCONCEPTS Div.
>
Much appreciated... but, I do have the tape on a separate controller. The
only one I had "lying around" the day I put in the sereer was a 39320...
(pretty sure that is it). Why such overkill? It was one of those 2am
situations and it was what I had available. I had always meant to swap it
out for something less overkill... but never have... and probably never
will. I'm getting great tape saving speeds with it and the AIT3's, like
750Mb/sec to 900Mb/sec.  Lately, it has dropped to 595Mb/sec... don't know
why, but my disks are fast filling up with junk...

It was a good suggestion, though, but I've been doing the separate
controller thing for backups for a long while. I got the suggestion from
someone at DPT when I first started using their controllers.

John\