Re: SATA vs SCSI
- From: "J. Clarke" <jclarke.usenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 18:08:27 -0500
Rob Nicholson wrote:
>> But the time has come to plan for the future and upgrade where
>> appropriate. We're looking at switching to Windows 2003 and buying
>> another server to host SQL Server and Exchange. We're at about 40 users
>> at the moment but have plans to grow to 100+
>
> A poynant little anecdote to this discussion... We have a secondary
> storage server running an dual Athlon MP 2800+ with lots of RAM and SATA
> RAID-0 sub-system. It's full of non-critical information such as archives,
> CD-ROM images etc. It's backed up once a month onto 5 LTO tapes.
>
> Anyway, we managed to fill the 600GB volume so bought another Sil3112 SATA
> RAID controller and two 400GB Samsung SATA drives. I have wasted an
> afternoon trying to get it working:
>
> o Creating RAID-0 array in the BIOS froze but appeared to create the array
> o Attempting to extend existing volume ended up with broken volume as the
> BIOS hadn't actually created the array
> o Updated the BIOS on the Sil3112 and voila - creating array was instant
> and didn't freeze
> o Attempting to use the array though in Windows 2000 Server caused server
> to freeze, hang and generate lots of disk errors
> o Attempting to use drives non-RAID and still lots of errors in the log
> about timeouts, bad blocks etc.
> o Adaptec SCSI adapter decided to pack up as well so can't restore the
> data on the same server
> o BackupExec's facility to store a tape catalog on the tape nevers seems
> to work so it'll take 10+ hours just to catalog
> o Then another 48 hours to restore original 600GB :-)
>
> Computer's aren't easy sometimes <grin>
>
> Low down is that it's either a) broken RAID controller, b) incompatability
> with Samsung drives, c) incompatability with Tiger motherboard, d) faulty
> drive, e) it's the phase of the moon.
>
> So not exactly glowing success for SATA RAID...
Someone at Silicon Image must be a member of the Radical Right who went
overboard on the morality stuff--their hardware doesn't play with itself,
at least their early SATA chips didn't. Try a RAID controller with a
different chip and I suspect that it will work fine--watch out for Raidcore
boards though--the Tiger 2875 has a specific problem with them that
required a couple of tries before they fixed it in the BIOS. Before you do
that though, make make sure that both the add-in board and the motherboard
are running the same revision of the Silicon Image firmware, even if you
have to backrev one of them to get there.
Your mention of the Adaptec host adapter packing up suggests that it might
be an interrupt problem--no matter how much Microsoft and Intel hype the
notion that Plug and Pray works and that PCI can share interrupts, in the
real world it _still_ doesn't work cleanly and I wish those twits would get
over themselves and put manual overrides in the default installation
instead of requiring that you reinstall the OS with a non-default HAL in
order to turn them on. Might be worth a try at musical boards to see if
there's an arrangement that makes it happy.
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
.
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