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.
The drop from 3 GB/s to 1.5 GB/s won't affect me any. But if this works,
consider it a heads up to any who feel the need for speed in their hard
drives. Let part 2 of this discussion begin!
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Gilbert Sebenste ********
(My opinions only!) ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University ****
E-mail: sebenste@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu **
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