Re: Recommendations for server: Intel E7520
Hi,
On Mon, 2005-11-14 at 16:03 +0100, annpost@can.no wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm talking with the local supplier of SuperMicro right now, and we've
> been talking about various machines. Looks like we're going for SATA 5
> anyway.
>
> > onboard ICH5 SATA controller. We left the other two drive bays disconnected.
> > I have yet to try the Zero Slot Adaptec controller that they are
>
> He has an ICH6 SATA controller in one machine he offered to us.
> Would that work out of the box? Any experiences?
>
> And with the ICH5 controller, did you have to do anything special to get
> it to work?
They both work just fine out of the box with 2.4 and 2.6 kernels.
A few things to keep in mind:
- hot swap works only sort of. I've seen on several Sarge installs with
2.4 kernels that after re-inserting the disk it can behave slightly odd.
The disk gets detected and all, but the kernel suddenly turned dma off,
stuff like that.
I haven't tried it with libata on a 2.6 kernel, but expect the same or
worse behaviour as Jeff Garzik who coded it specifically says that ich5
and 6 will not have perfectly working hot swap. Ich7 will.
- If you want to monitor disks with smartmontools (and you want that!)
some tinkering is required on 2.6 kernels if you use libata. You need
the smartmontools package from unstable and a kernel with the correct
libata patch. Afaik vanilla 2.6.14 does not have the necessary
ata-passthrough yet. If it does, please tell me how to turn it on,
because it's not working for me right now :) The -mm kernels do have
this patch but those are a lot more unstable / development kernels and I
don't think you want to run that in production.
For me I use the Intel ICH's as much as possible when I need no or
software raid and 3ware cards when I really really need hardware raid
and I haven't regretted it for a second.
Hope this helps.
> Regards
> Ann
Regards,
--
Guus Houtzager Email: guus@houtzager.net
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