From: 	Michael Pifer 
Sent: 	Thursday, May 14, 1998 1:46 PM
To: 	news@xlr8yourmac.com
Subject: 	G3 SCSI Raid

Ahh, another one I can relate some experience on...
this will be a long story, so bear with me on this one,
 it really is two separate issues 
here, so you can break the results down as needed....

I recently converted my G3 minitower to an all SCSI system.
I initially purchased a Streamlogic Jackhammer card (from Mac Gurus)
 and a Quantum Atlas II 4.3 gig drive (after reading and comparing your 
findings on SCSI cards I might add).  I also went further, and replaced
 the Apple 24x IDE CD Rom drive with an Apple 24x SCSI CD ROM. 
  
Talk about an improvement.  However, I experienced problems with IDE
 in the transition.  If I booted off the SCSI hard drive, I would have 
lockups on rebooting, or shutting down.  To experiment, I put the IDE 
CD ROM back in, same problem.  If I booted off of the IDE drive, the 
lockups went away.  After playing the "which extension may be causing
 problems game", I found a couple of culprits, Norton Filesaver, and 
Crashguard.  After disabling both of these, I could boot off of the 
SCSI drive, and restart every time without a lockup, and only experience
the shutdown lockup maybe one out of three times.  When it did lockup,
no apparent file damage would occur...

After talking with MacGuru’s (GREAT place to buy from), I tried removing
 the IDE drive and cables altogether.  VIOLA, no more lockups at all, 
with or without Filesaver and Crashguard enabled.  It would seem the G3s
 do not work well with a mixed Ultra Wide SCSI and IDE setup. 
 
I then (being the consummate perfectionist) tried the IDE CD ROM again. 
 No lockups.  Which seems to be why the G3s with UW SCSI cards work, 
they don’t have an IDE hard drive.  Mix the two, you got problems. 
 It seems to be either one, or the other, but not both at the same 
time.

Now, wanting to try to eventually dabble in video capture, I ran across
 a great bargain on a 9 gig UW drive.  I wanted to run a RAID setup, so I
referred back to your page on RAID software, and purchased Conley SoftRAID.
  However to make this work, I really needed to redo the 4 gig drive’s 
partitioning, etc.  Enter the IDE drive again.  Backed up the data to it,
 ran Conley SoftRaid on the 2 UW SCSI drives.  It would lock up after every
 raid partitioning event ( ie setting up a mirrored partition, or a striped
 partition), forcing me to restart after each one was set up.
  
However, everything seemed to be fine, other than it said the mirrored partitions
 were out of sync each time this happened (since there was no data on them yet,
 a simple sync the partitions worked).  After getting a mix of mirrored and striped
 partitions, copied data back from the IDE drive, and removed the IDE drive again.
  Works great.

I now have 2 one gig mirrored HFS+ partitions, one striped 4+ gig HFS partition
 (for video capture (not HFS+ again based on your web page comments/suggestions
 for video capture), and then the remainder of the 9 gig drive broken up into 
3 more partitions (a 2 gig DOS partition for my Apple DOS card, and shared files,
 and 2 one gig partitions for downloading, games, etc).

Bottom line in both cases....IDE hard drives and UW cards/drives do not mix when
 it comes to the G3s, at least in my experience.  The reader who is having the problems
 with RAID toolkit is experiencing many of the same problems I did.  

Feel free to share this letter with him 
have him e-mail me, or even post part or all of it.

Michael Pifer       		Grinnell College
ResNet Specialist    	       Computer Services
http://www.grin.edu/~resweb

"Every computer in the world is basically a Macintosh now, but a lot of computers
 just aren’t as good.   They don’t feel like a Mac."
Apple Computer co-founder and UC Berkeley graduate Steve Wozniak speaking at the
 1998 UC Berkely graduation ceremonies.