On 03/12/2011 09:00 AM, compdoc wrote:
I agree, Supermicro does design good boards, with a lot of server-grade features that consumer boards lack. Not cheap, but worth the money. I assume the long power-on pause is due to the BIOS silently checking RAM, with the side effect of giving the disks ample time to spin up.
I have a total of 15 drives. Three of them are fast 2-1/2" drives used for the host OS filesystems, running on the ICH-10 SATA controller. No problem at all with those.
The other 12 drives are 2TB WD Caviar Black series. 6 are connected to the on-board 8-port LSI 1068E chip, and 6 divided equally between 2 Tempo 'Sonnet' 4-port PCIe cards (Marvell chips). All drives have the same 8 partitions each.
All drives have the same 8-partition configuration. The LSI controller supports 8 RAID-6 arrays using 5 active drives plus a hot spare. The Tempo controllers support the same arrangement using the other 6 drives.
The firmware on everything is up to date.
Other than the annoying failure to bind 1 or 2 random partitions on the last drive in each group of 6, the performance of this configuration is quite good. I still have the 'scsi_mod.scan=sync' kernel parameter in place, so there may be some other cause of the failure to bind some of the partitions. FWIW, in more than 10 system boots, there has never been any consistent pattern to these failures.
Chuck
I assume the long power-on pause is due to the BIOS silently checking RAM, with the side effect of giving the disks ample time to spin up.
Most likely. I have an old Supermicro board (Dual Athlon MP) that's being retired from frontline service and it has a long delay from when you power it up to when it shows the POST screen. Swapping the 4GB of ECC RAM for a single non-ECC stick greatly speeds that process up so I assume there's some sort of tests it runs that can take a while.