Re: LOR on current

On Wed, 24 Mar 2004, Jon Noack wrote:
> On 3/24/2004 4:04 PM, Scott Long wrote:
> > Don Bowman wrote:
> >> can i switch asr to aac without reformatting my disks?
> >
> > I beleive so, but I'll have to get back to you on the details.
> > There might be some gotchas.
>
> I looked through the whole thread, so if I missed something and this is
> a stupid question, I apologize:
> I have an Adaptec 2100S (uses an i960RS according to the ASR source) --
> does the above mean I can use the AAC driver instead of the ASR driver
> (after adding the device id, of course)?

No.  The difference with these cards (and all of the other cards that use
an i960 processor) is not in the chips themselves, but in the firmware
that runs on them.  The part that I'm unsure of (and I'll find out in the
next day) is whether the AAC 2120/2200 cards can migrate the on-disk
metadata from an ASR array.  Having reviewed the firmware, I'm pretty sure
that it can, but I want to make sure before I jeoprodize Don's data =-)

>
> If you're not sure but optimistic, I'd be happy to give it a shot and
> report back.  I have free disk space on one of my machines at home
> (primarily Windows but I've run FreeBSD on it before).  I'd prefer if it
> wouldn't nuke other partitions, but it's mostly games so it wouldn't be
> a huge loss if it did.

Feel free to experiment, but don't be surprised if it eats your disks,
dogs, children, etc.

>
> Jon
>
> P.S. Just be thankful you're not running Windows 9x.  The 2100S has
> Windows 9x drivers, but even the most recently released version causes
> extensive file corruption.  An IDE drive on the same machine is fine
> with Windows 9x.  It seems to work fine with Windows 2000/XP, however.
>

Have you reported this to Adaptec tech support?  I can't say that I'm
overly thrilled with many things that relate to ASR, but this is worse
than normal.

Scott

P.S. My other email address (for the next week) is scott_long_at_adaptec.com