Date: Mon, 1 Apr 2002 12:24:02 +1000 (est) From: Andrew MacIntyre <andymac@bullseye.apana.org.au> To: Willie Viljoen <will@laserfence.net> Cc: <freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Instability with offboard IDE controller, CMD-649 Message-ID: <Pine.OS2.4.32.0204011137190.5950-100000@tenring.andymac.org> In-Reply-To: <20020331074609.D314-100000@phoenix.vh.laserfence.net>
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On Sun, 31 Mar 2002, Willie Viljoen wrote: > Try running your controller at a high load and see if it survives, if it > can handle it, then chances are mine is just a dud (which would not be > entirely surprising, in South Africa, nothing works) I'm not setup to make world on the FreeBSD box with the CMD card. The nearest thing I could come up to for a torture test was to run two simultaneous bonnie benchmark runs with 500MB data files (the box is SMP with 2xP5-166MMX CPUs and 64MB RAM, 4.4R) It survived, total character I/O was about 85% better than a single bonnie run, total block I/O stayed about the same, and the total seek rate dropped about 20%. I expected the I/O results, but not the seek rate drop. Took about 10 minutes, give or take a couple. I rebooted immediately after the tests, and it went down and came back up with no dramas. I wouldn't call this conclusive though. > Also, if anybody reading could recommend some proper hardware that won't > put me back too much financially, I'd be willing to try tinkering with > hardware configurations... I would also be willing to spend money to get > some nice hardware, but with the current situation of the South African > Rand, buying anything decent usually puts you back more than a month's > salary, easily. Various people have apparently had success (and failures) with cards based on the Promise and HighPoint chipsets, which are usually sold as "RAID" cards - supporting RAID 0 & 1 via software. They can be used as ordinary ATA controllers without the RAID support (thought Soren Schmidt's (sp?) ar driver supports them in RAID mode). The HighPoint and Promise chipsets are commonly used on the ATA-RAID versions of various motherboards. I have an Abit HotRod-100 based on a HighPoint-370 to go into another box, and I believe IWill make a card based on this chip as well. FYI you can (IIRC) find links to IWill and Promise based cards in the Storage section of http://www.eyo.com.au/ - about AU$100-120 and AU$85 respectively from memory. They also list more expensive Promise cards, and a CMD-0649 based card from ST-Labs (about AU$55) - even though you probably don't want want one ;-). I list EYO's website as a source of information, rather than a recommendation as a source of supply (though I and others I know have had no problems dealing with them). Hope this info helps. PS, know how you feel with the currency situation - we're not a lot better off here (nearly AU$2 to the US$). -- Andrew I MacIntyre "These thoughts are mine alone..." E-mail: andymac@bullseye.apana.org.au | Snail: PO Box 370 andymac@pcug.org.au | Belconnen ACT 2616 Web: http://www.andymac.org/ | Australia To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hardware" in the body of the message
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