Topic: Big Hard Disks

[Chris Woods]

I'm Running SME 5.6 on this configuration:

Intel Celeron 1.7 GHZ
Intel 845 GBV Motherboard
512 MB Registered Memory DDR
Adaptec 29160
Exabyte VXA-1 Tape Unit
2 X Seagate Barracuda 120 GB ATA V

Durring installation the drives will setup raid VERY SLOW and the machine takes hours to complete the install.  If I swap out the drives and put two seagate 40 GB ATA V in everything is fine.

Is there a hard disk size limitation to e-smith?  Has anyone used these drives?  Does anyone have e-smith 5.6 running on IDE drives over 100GB?

Thanks in advance

[Dan Williams]

Hi Chris,
I have had some problems with the seagates period.
If you search the forum, you will find a post I made, and a reply from seagate something to the effect that they have an "optimized" version of the drives.
Another thing I found using the seagates, was after the mirror was established, every time the server was powered off, (shutdown - h now) and then back on it would rebuild the mirror.
Just my experiences.
Dan

[Chris Woods]

How big were the disks?  Were they ATA V?

I have contacted Seagate regarding the issue and I have them simulating the setup in there labs.

The ATA IV Barracuda's seem to work great however.

tks.

[Per Sørensen]

I have 2 x 120Gb Western Digital 8Mb cache IDE in a RAID1, on a ver. 5.1.2. That's running very well. MB is an old ASUS PII board

Per

[Chris Woods]

How long did it take you to install??

[Ray Mitchell]

The syncing of the 2 disks can take many hours eg 2 x 80Gb IBM's approx 6-7 hours to sync.

Regards
Ray

[Tom Keiser]

Chris wrote:

"Does anyone have e-smith 5.6 running on IDE drives over 100GB?"

I have a 5.6 UR server with 2 x 120GB mirrored drives attached to a 3ware controller.  Everything has been fine for several months, and the speed is exceptional.

Tom

[Per Sørensen]

Chris Woods wrote:
>
> How long did it take you to install??

Hmm... 15-20 minutes,not longer than normal. But as metioned elsewhere here, it syncs the disks for hours. But you can use the system while it syncs anyway.

Per

[Chris Woods]

I changed the Seagate 120 GB for Western Digital 120 GB disks and installed a P4 1.7 and it took a day to install.  And now when I do a cat /proc/mdstat to check the status of the array it tells me it will take about 1400 Minutes to finish syncing.

I looks to be working but it took a hole day to install.  I can access and configure the server but I'm sure it's a bug in ver 5.6 and my newer hardware.  Hopefully it will be fixed in the future versions.

[Ray Mitchell]

Chris
There was a post in these forums approx a month or two ago about newer hardware and some problems, I think it was to do with hard drive settings etc. Posted by Charlie Brady I think.
Do a search, it may be useful to you.

That does sound a bit too long for instal, something seems to be slowing it down.

I did the search for you on author Charlie Brady and found the post I was thinking of, it may be worth a try.
http://www.e-smith.org/bboard//read.php?v=t&f=3&i=26930&t=26898

"I've seen the same extremely slow install problem on one new system. Changing the DMA settings in the BIOS for the hard drive(s) from AUTO to UDMA2 fixed the problem. That' s worth a try."


Regards
Ray Mitchell

[jose velez]

I have 4 IBM 120GB using 3Ware 7000 RAID Controller with 360GB capacity running 5.6.  The server started with 5.1 and was upgraded in Jan to 5.6.  the server is about a year old now.  It is very fast.  

For backup I have On-Stream 60/120 UWSCSI tape with Tapeware.  Right now has over 70GB stored and takes two tape since most files are Drive Images and ISO files.

[Chris Woods]

You guys are all running older hardware.  Does anyone know if the 3ware 7500-4LP is supported? I'm thinking this will cure it.  

I've switched to Western Digital 120 GB Drives instead of the 120 Seagates and the install completes and works afters about 20 hrs of the raid pack syncing however performance is painfully slow.

At this point i'd also like to reiterate that I'd like to run software raid and I'm sure there is some kind of problem with either controller support on the intel 845GBV motherboard for these drives or some kind of incompatibility with SME 5.6.

[jose velez]

The 3ware I am running is 7500 with 4 ibm 120GB drives.  I had trouble with a Intel 845 chipset under 5.5 e-smith (It would not finish the install).

[Chris Woods]

Thanks,

I guess I'll have to throw more money at it.  The Intel 845 GBV board works great otherwise, I've used it in several SME 5.6 servers and it's great if you are using hard drives 40 GB and smaller it is probably a limitation of the bios then so the external controller is the way to go if you have 120GB or more (I think).

I've tried contacting Intel about the bios issue (no resolution to it)
I've contacted seagate about the failure to boot problem after installation on this board and they are currently investigating the problem with their 120 GB drive.

The Western Digitals seem to have the best compatibility however I'm a little worried about long term reliabilty with these.

[Ian Lowe]

FWIW,

I have an SME 5.6 server running with three 160Gb Maxtor Drives, and a 120Gb WD without problems. I also found that (quite happily) SME supports the PCI IDE Cards from Promise or Silicon Image, allowing us to add a *lot* of disk to an SME Server easily...