Hitachi vs Seagate: Opinions wanted

[David Sze]

On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 06:03:27PM +0200, Matthias Andree wrote:
> David Sze <dsze at alumni.uwaterloo.ca> writes:
> 
> > If you will be using a motherboard with an LSI Logic chipset (mpt driver
> > under FreeBSD), definitely do _not_ get Hitachi/IBM drives.
> 
> There's more than one LSI chipset (there are at least the sym, mpt and
> amr cards, sym for 53c8xx and 53c1010, mpt for 53c1020 and 53c1030, AMR
> for MegaRAID stuff).

I can see how my message was ambiguous - I only meant the "mpt" driver (hence
the part in brackets), the 53c1030 for sure, don't know about the 53c1020.


> > There's a weird interaction that causes the OS not to boot if there is
> > more than one Hitachi drive attached to an mpt controller.  A single
> > drive works fine.
> 
> That might be a matter of the BIOS in question.

Perhaps, but consider that there are no problems with more than one of any
other brand of drive.  Just look at the archives:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2003-October/004638.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2003-October/004640.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2003-October/004689.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-scsi/2003-October/000770.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2003-November/004924.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-scsi/2003-December/000871.html
http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2003-August/015092.html

Until the "mpt" driver gets an active FreeBSD maintainer, I'd stay away from
it in combination with Hitachi/IBM drives.