Looking for info on FCAL Interface

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Allen M.

Looking for info on FCAL Interface

Post by Allen M. »

IBM makes some SCSI drives with Fibre Channel-Arbitrated Loop (FCAL) interfaces. This is a new one on me; what does FCAL provide? Any help?

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Allen, now at his new website http://www.ury2k.com/pulse/index.htm
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BTW, 200MB transfer rate is advertised for FCAL as opposed to 80 for SCSI-2

[This message has been edited by Allen M. (edited January 16, 2000).]
Dakkon
Posts: 332
Joined: Sat Oct 24, 1998 6:01 am
Location: Fl.
Contact:

Looking for info on FCAL Interface

Post by Dakkon »

Allen,
I only wish I had those drives! AWESOME is an understatement. Heavy Duty is another word that comes to mind. Along with $$$$$$$$ Terabyte,datawarehouseing & SQL also come to mind. I'm sure you saw IBMs whitepaper Basicly FC-AL is used in Long Distance and or HIGH speed situations.High device count per PCI slot @ 126 devices. Almost unlimited devices on a FC-AL chain(16 MILLION in theroy)Cluster Servers or any server for that matter can use them and be miles away from the physical drives. Transparent to drive failures(?self healing?)will work around a failed drive.
That's about it for now. I need to crash so i can hit the bricks and get a J O B.
Cheers,
Chuck
Allen M.

Looking for info on FCAL Interface

Post by Allen M. »

Chuck,

This noon I ordered one Coppermine, one Tyan motherboard, and one 128 meg PC133 FSB chip. I couldn't get the ASUS MB; not in stock anywhere. I didn't get the best prices advertised although I got the best price I could find for items in stock. 733s and ASUS P3 MBs are scarce and in short supply.

I should have the parts in a few days and will pull apart my older system to get the Coppermine up and running, then investigate other goodies, such as SCSI drives, etc.

I came close to selecting an Athlon (200 MHz FSB)which is definitely superior in terms of real number computations performing three instructions per clock cycle, but the driver problem has me concerned.

There exists a burning desire for a dual 733, but ASUS only makes a 100 MHz FSB for that. If my DELL 450 PC is in a standard ATX case, there is always next year when CPU speeds will exceed 1GHz, 64 bits wide. Image


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Allen, now at his new website http://www.ury2k.com/pulse/index.htm
<hr>
16 million hard drives. Oh, heaven.
Can this UBB do 10 to the sixth?

Get a J O B? Do some contracting.

[This message has been edited by Allen M. (edited January 18, 2000).]
Dakkon
Posts: 332
Joined: Sat Oct 24, 1998 6:01 am
Location: Fl.
Contact:

Looking for info on FCAL Interface

Post by Dakkon »

Allen,
Throwing my hat in that ring.
Waiting for some one to byte Image
I'm doing an Athlon 500 with a overclock card on it(500's will go 700+)Just waiting for the computer show.
Cheers,
Chuck
Allen M.

Looking for info on FCAL Interface

Post by Allen M. »

Overclocking the Athlon is popular.

I considered holding-off in the 733 for the a computer show up here the week after next, but I already picked-out my prey several months ago. The real performance increase will be in the peripherals I select. I plan on selling-off my jaz drive with the five or six disks that go with it, and I've been offered a handsome hunk of cash for the old MB and PII If I rebuild their system with it, so already my cost to new PC has dropped dramatically. It will be used as a software development tool and a picture processor (I'd like to write another karate book sometime with color pictures -- 4.something megs apiece).

When I get the Sounblaster Platinum and Cakewalk, Dennis will also use it to compose music on. He's been into Dream Theater for a while and that's what he has been playing lately, developing a wicked style like John Petrucci. It pretty wild and complicated music and will lend itself well to PC composing.

It won't be online to the internet, though. Too much work to risk on a virus sneaking through, and they ARE getting smarter.

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Allen, now at his new website http://www.ury2k.com/pulse/index.htm
<hr>
Petrucci: http://members.tripod.com/zepdeth/picspetrucci.html

[This message has been edited by Allen M. (edited January 19, 2000).]
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