[ldm-users] Fedora 7 redux: BUSTED!

[Gilbert Sebenste]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Gilbert Sebenste wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I am not ready to call weather.admin.niu.edu stable. But a "gotcha" is worth 
> noting for all:
>
> My hard drive on weather.admin.niu.edu is a Seagate 750 GB, 3 GB/s at 7200 
> RPM. It uses something called SATA 2 to achieve the 3 GB/s
> throughput. After talking to a system administrator locally, a kernel 
> maintainer from Redhat, and doing research on the Web, there are still 
> problems with SATA 2...which can result in the drive crashing. In fact, I 
> learned that even DVR's that have their drives swapped out with ones that use 
> the SATA 2 protocol have this very same problem. And a local sysadmin I know 
> fried a few hard drives using it a 3 GB...on a Windows XP machine with a 
> hardware RAID because it didn't like it.
>
> The solution...the one recommended by RedHat...the guys with the DVR 
> problem...and others was to put a jumper on it so that it only uses SATA 1, 
> or 1.5 GB speed. That I did a few days ago, and no crashes, yet. When I first 
> booted up this machine with the new drive at 3 GB/s, it took 5 days before it 
> crashed. I'll wait a few weeks before I call this cured, if in fact it is. I 
> also slapped on a new kernel tonight (2.6.23), which seems to be working 
> fine.

Well, I just got a new hard drive for our new weather2.admin.niu.edu 
machine, which U had online but took off because of the same problem. When 
I got the new one...SURPRISE!...a jumper had been put on by somebody, 
probably at the company I ordered them from, to have it only use SATA 1. 
Box was opened, too. Busted! Looks like I wasn't the only one experiencing 
this problem. Of course, that doesn't explain if the problem is at hard 
drive firmware level, or OS level. Either way...

My machine used to crash after 4-12 hours. I rebooted it last night for 
the kernel upgrade, but it was up 2 days...one of the longer periods it 
was up before the first time I loaded it on there.

So, we'll see how it goes. But for now...it's working.

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Gilbert Sebenste                                                     ********
(My opinions only!)                                                  ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University                      ****
E-mail: sebenste at weather.admin.niu.edu                                  ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu                                      **
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