[NTLUG:Discuss] Sata Drives and Linux

[Richard Geoffrion]

Dave Augustus wrote:

>Anyone have any experience with SATA on linux?
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Yes

>What to buy?
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UG...

>What to stay away from?
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Yes

>Linux SATA RAID with 3ware ?
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Yes..

>Thanks,
>Dave Augustus
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You're welcome.


MY experience.. ....with MY  two 3Ware Escalade 8-port 9xxx series 
drives with two internal SATA drives via the system bus.... is that it 
is extremely slow.  Granted, I'm moving around GIGS and GIGS of data at 
a time and supposedly raw throughput is good...but compared to an U320 
SCSI system mounted below it...the SATA system just CRAWLS!

Working with SATA drives in the Kernel was also a bit frustrating for my 
Slackware setup.  I had the whole chicken-before-the-egg thing going 
on.  Newer Linux versions/bootdisk/etc.. are beginning to implement SATA 
making things easier to use.    I can only hope that things will 
continue to improve.

I think some of my concerns with my SATA setup may be contributed to an 
issue that I have just discovered.  It seems that the ASUS A7V600 
motherboards have an issue...particularly an issue of VOLTAGE.   This 
voltage issue manifested itself by causing all sorts of errors with the 
SATA drives -- meaning that the +5Volt delivered by the power supply  
was not properly delivered to the components.   Changing out the power 
supply with a brand-new fresh one made the problem go away...but by the 
third one on this particular system I got suspicious and tested the 
power supply itself.   A good solid +5.04 volts  on an ABIT (Nvidia 
chipset) KV7 [KT880] motherboard. (compared with the 4.62 volts the ASUS 
motherboard was reporting from the exact same power supply.)

I found three servers experiencing the same symptoms ( hard drive 
data-instability, sometimes the drive was recognized--sometimes not, and 
general data corruption) and dang it if every ONE of those systems 
weren't running an ASUS A7V600 w/ SATA drives.

To me... SATA = Sensitive.  But then YMMV.

I'm in the process of swapping the ASUS MB with one of those ABIT 
boards... I can let you know how it turns out.  It'll be nice to have a 
stable system.

If I had to do it again, I'd go SATA-II...for performance reasons.  My 
Maxtor Maxline Plus-II drives have not been as reliable as I would have 
wished them to be, but I don't know if that issue is related. to my 
voltage issue.

I have a 7-disk RAID-5 volume, a three disk raid-0 volume, and several 
single drives configured with LVM.  I have the 3ware command line 
interface working and I can replace RAID5 drive members on-the-fly..and 
can remove and add in hot pull drives as needed.  Somewhere I have it 
documented and can post if need be.

-- 
Richard