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...

[Lars]

Hi!

Some Infos:
The last two days I tried to install SME 5.6 on a very new system: MSI Board (a very new one with Bluetooth), two 120 GB HD etc.
I thought, new hardware will be compatible enough for a little server...
No, I didn't want to use all these features but I've bought the board to use the RAID-Controller.
But the result of my installation-orgie is, after hours of waiting the progress-bar shows 570 hours and copying was terrible slow!!!!!!!!!
I tried another CD with the same result. On another PC with older hardware it takes only 10 minutes to set up the box.

CU
Lars

[Chris Woods]

I've recently had the same problem.  If you are using the IDE's that came of the motherboard and you're drives are over 80GB you will have this problem.  I opted to use the 3ware Escalade 7000-2 (the ONLY ATA RAID controller supported by E-Smith) and it resolved the problem.

[toby]

Is it definitely a matter of 80GB as i have had the same problem with the MSI board (EMax2) and an intel 845 based board with two 60GB seagates running the software raid 0.....flys when not mirrored however.

[Ed Form]

Chris Woods wrote:
>
> I've recently had the same problem.  If you are using the
> IDE's that came of the motherboard and you're drives are over
> 80GB you will have this problem.  I opted to use the 3ware
> Escalade 7000-2 (the ONLY ATA RAID controller supported by
> E-Smith) and it resolved the problem.

This isn't size dependent. The same problems with software raid occur with several [possibly all] types of disks on SME 5.6. I've seen it on Seagate 60s and on Western Digitals as well. Something in the software raid/disk handling combination of SME 5.6 is bust. Best guess from the symptoms I have seen is a clash between journalling and raid organisation that results in constant housekeeping to the exclusion of data recording.

Ed Form

[Charlie Brady]

Ed Form wrote:

> This isn't size dependent. The same problems with software
> raid occur with several [possibly all] types of disks on SME
> 5.6. I've seen it on Seagate 60s and on Western Digitals as
> well. Something in the software raid/disk handling
> combination of SME 5.6 is bust.

The only problems which we've ever seen, or have ever been reported, have been with Intel 845 chipsets, as is the case here. There is a known DMA problem with the RH7.3 kernel series with that chipset.

I've had success tuning down BIOS settings (UDMA2 on both drives worked for me).  Give that a try.

Regards

Charlie

[Ed Form]

Charlie Brady wrote:
>
> Ed Form wrote:
>
> > This isn't size dependent. The same problems with software
> > raid occur with several [possibly all] types of disks on SME
> > 5.6. I've seen it on Seagate 60s and on Western Digitals as
> > well. Something in the software raid/disk handling
> > combination of SME 5.6 is bust.
>
> The only problems which we've ever seen, or have ever been
> reported, have been with Intel 845 chipsets, as is the case
> here. There is a known DMA problem with the RH7.3 kernel
> series with that chipset.

It would be good if the answers to some of these fundamental problems were posted on the bugs page so that we could move on and forget about them. I reported this matter to smebugs@mitel.com on Saturday 28th December last, and there have been a number of exchanges about it in the forums since. Why no one liner on the bugs page?

> I've had success tuning down BIOS settings (UDMA2 on both
> drives worked for me).  Give that a try.

That's the one liner!!!!!!!

Ed Form

[Steve Clifton]

I have an SME 5.6 running software raid on 2  * IBM 180Gb disks (7200rpm)

Seems to work fine with ATA100 and DMA enabled.

Using it as a samba server without any problems. Slower than NT but thats another story.

Regards

Steve