Mufutau Towobola wrote in a message to Mike Bilow:
MB>In general, IDE/EIDE drives on NetWare servers should be avoided.  They ti
MB>up the CPU while doing I/O, and cannot offload processng as SCSI drives ca
 MT> Thanks. I was aware of that Mike. My SCSI drive on the
 MT> Server was abending and I could tell the problem was with
 MT> the drive, so I wanted to intall the EIDE in the server and
 MT> copy all the files into it and send the SCSI back for
 MT> repair... But I was able to install the EIDE last night and
 MT> everything is OK... I don't have much workstations attached
 MT> to the server anyway, just about 4 PCs and they are mostly
 MT> idle most of the time, so speed is not that of a concerned,
 MT> as long as I can do the backup from a workstation that has a
 MT> HP DAT tape drive attached to it without abending.... Thanks
 MT> for you input. 
Well, you specifically asked about performance!
I would be interested to know what problems you had with the SCSI drive.  
What was the brand and model?  Some of the Seagates need to be configured to 
run under NetWare, and Seagate makes a utility available to do this.  The 
main thing is that the write cache must be disabled, so that media errors in 
the course of writing are reflected back to NetWare immediately so it can 
apply its "hotfix" logic.  In fact, any operating system which does hotfix 
should have this change made, including OS/2 (if using HPFS), NT (if using 
NTFS), and Unix (in all cases).
Another problem with Seagates is that they are shipped by default with 
automatic write reallocation mapping disabled.  I can think of no 
justification for this, but it is quite hard to enable unless you really know 
what you are doing and have the necessary tools.  I use Linux and the 
scsiinfo utility to manipulate internal drive mode pages, but this is not for 
the squeamish or inexperienced -- you can easily slip up and make the drive 
totally inaccessible, especially since you have to modify the drive's NVRAM.
 
-- Mike
--- 
---------------