[CentOS] OT - disk bays

[John R Pierce]

On 02/03/11 1:57 PM, Steve Thompson wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>
>> Oh, that silliness. What I dislike are the PERC 700s, that will *only*
>> accept Dell drives, not commodity ones.
> My understanding is that Dell has reversed this policy via a firmware
> update after a flood of complaints. I don't have any 700's to check this,
> but I believe they will now accept non-Dell drives. Certainly the Perc 5's
> and 6's do.

the complication being that random off-the-shelf drives probably haven't 
been qualified with the raid controller, and have the potential for any 
number of nasty side effects.    even simple firmware revision changes 
on the same model drive can break things, relating to write barriers and 
buffer flushing.

this is especially problematic for SATA drives, where the majority of 
them are optimized for desktop single user performance and take all 
kinda shortcuts that would adversely affect data reliability in a raid 
environment.