Re: IDE Controller on Alphaserver1200 (and swap question)
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Will Rosecrans wrote:
> Hello, everybody. I have an Alphaserver 1200 running Debian. It is
> currently just doing NAT to share my internet connection with my LAN,
> and about to be doing DHCP on my LAN once I get that configured. I now
> want to make it a file server. I don't want to invest in big SCSI
> drives, so I'm going to get an IDE controller. Can I just get any run
> of the mill IDE PCI card, pop it in, and have at it, or are there some
> caveats I need to be aware of?
>
None that I'm aware of, but I normally use standard PCs for file storage
(cheaper, and save the big iron for more useful work).
> I'll continue to boot off the small SCSI drive I currently have the OS
> on, so I don't need the machine to see the drives on its own. Just need
> to store files. The PCI slots in the machine are longer than I'm used
> to, but it shouldn't hurt anything, right?
>
Nope - 64-bit PCI and PCI-X slots are backwards compatible with regular
PCI. The only thing you might run into is voltage issues - some slots
(and cards) are 5 volt only, and some are 3.3 volt only.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102045 is a
universal card that has both a PATA and 2 SATA ports on it - it'll work
with either 3.3v or 5v. The way to tell if it's built for universal
voltage is to look for two notches cut into the PCI interface slot. A
notch (IIRC) towards the front indicates a 5-volt only card, and a notch
towards the back indicates a 3.3v card.
> Also, under Debian/Alpha, swap space adds to memory, right? I know
> under some OS's, you need to have at least as much swap as RAM in order
> for it to do anything. I have 512 MB in this machine, but only a 2 GB
> drive, so I don't want to dedicate > 512 MB to swap. When I get the IDE
> drives set up, I can move the swap there, so it'll be a non-issue then.
>
You can put swap wherever you need to. With 512 MB of RAM, if you know
that you're not going to see something like a slashdotting, and your
memory consumption isn't too bad, you can run without swap (I do that on
a lot of servers - there's only a couple that I use swap on, and those
are subjected to crapfloods, spambots, DDoS's and other assorted
nastiness). A lot of embedded systems don't have the space for a swap
file, either.
Swap space is not normal memory - it is a place for the memory manager
to stash things in memory that are not actively being used in order to
free up memory for active processes. It degrades performace severely -
you should not run into swap in normal operations. It's a crutch to
handle machines that are under-spec'd in memory.
> Thanks, all!
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