LS2 Upgrade Possibilities? Going out of head insane..

[Keven Tipping_1]

Greetings to all.

I recently aquired a LS2 and LS Netserver (two units) for a price that I have been debating over ($350 Canadian).

The LS came with all bad Hard Drives, and worse, the LS2 has two bad hard drives. Several of the HD's just sit there with the loading lights on, others let out a incredably loud whirl/hiss, and the remaining seem to work just fine. I seem to have found 5 drives working, but one is seriously questionable.

The LS is basically garbage in terms of working order.. 64mb RAM, Single Processor, no DC to DC Converter for Dual CPU, bad HDs, etc.. Therefore I have stripped down the LS somewhat and put the 64mb worth of RAM on the card into the LS2 (230mb Total now with both Mem cards).

I also had to replace a bad 100mhz Pentium CPU in the LS2 that was causing freezeups (It disabled one of the CPUS automatically, however, I dunno if I got the bad one- I just cleaned up the board and cleaned the connectors and CPU sockets with a little Isopropyl Alch.).

I often wonder if these things were worth it.. Anyhow. I guess I have lots of spare parts incase the good LS2 breaks down.

I'm fairly new to this whole dual/quad CPU thing and seperate memory boards.. I deal with SCSI-2 on my Macintosh, however, I am at a loss on this Netserver.

Here is my primary problem.
The HDs can be replaced for cheap.. However. This SCSI controller is driving me insane. It is bad enough that I have to use a seperate floppy (no Navigator CD with the unit(s)) to configure the BIOS, but for the RAID too? Wow.

I have read conflicting things about these Mylex OEM cards. In my humble opinion, the 960PL in this system looks like it should be in a $1 bin at the place I bought it from.. I'd flash the card with the Mylex firmware, but then my remaining (working) HP drives might bite it somehow.. Therefore I would like to ditch the Mylex in favor of a new up-to-date PCI Raid card that might support Linux or something.

Here is what I'd like to know. Ebay has D4943A Netraid cards like nothing else.. I suspect by looking at the card that it is more feature-ful then the Mylex OEM board. Will a newer (key word- newer) Netraid PCI card work in this Netserver LS2? Netserver has latest BIOS, etc.

Second- does the Netraid above support the CTRL-M thing, and, does this take the place of the inferno'd Floppy Disk (that takes fooooooooorever to init the array) so I need not bother with the Jetset util?

Also- excatly what type of HD's are these SCSI things? Ultra, etc? HD Sleds say SCA-23A.. What is this? And will the Netraid controller FULLY support these drives, maybe even bigger arrays then 32gb?

And third-

In anyones honest opinion with any of these older Netservers.. Are they, uh, technically speaking, usable? Are they fairly powerful, and generally able to accomlish the job they set out for (ie- Win2K, Linux, etc)? And do I have to worry about these crazy drives going off on me like dead flies? I don't really want to have my server crash every month.... Nor do I want to give HP $325 for a new drive.

[Greg Carlson]

Keven,

$325 even in Canadien dollars seems way too much for those old servers. The LS/LS2 models are good for firewalls and routers as the capacity of those servers even with dual or quad CPU's is still less than one new cpu 1ghz model. Not too mention the memory limitations. The mylex card had a limit for logical drives of 32gb, which at the time of 500 mb, 1gb and 2gb hdds you couldn't even reach 32gb. I would load it up with whatever hardware you have and play with linux or something but I wouldn't invest more money in it unless you find things dirt cheap.

Yes the NetRaid classic card which you mentioned is a better card than the mylex, thats because it is a couple of years newer.. The LS/LS2 models are already 7-8 years old in technology.

The hard drives are only capable of Fast Wide 20/mb second and the maxim memory in the server was a whopping 768 MB--> Thats with 24x 32mb simms. (It was great for its time!)

Ciao,
Greg