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