Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 29 Aug 2003 22:00:58 +0800 | From | Nick Urbanik <> | Subject | Re: Single P4, many IDE PCI cards == trouble?? |
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Dear Folks,
Alan Cox wrote:
> On Gwe, 2003-08-29 at 01:49, Nick Urbanik wrote: > > Dear Folks, > > > > With a single 2.26GHz P4, an Asus P4B533-E motherboard, is it possible > > to reliably use two additional PCI IDE cards (using SI680), one hard > > disk per channel, and have the thing work reliably? > > You should be able to, although with software raid your PCI bandwidth > limits will limit the ultimate performance for mirroring/raid
Performance is a relatively minor issue compared with stability and low cost.
Is there _anyone_ who is using a number of ATA133 IDE disks (>=6), each on its own IDE channel, on a number of PCI IDE cards, and doing so successfully and reliably? I begin to suspect not! If so, please tell us what motherboard, IDE cards you are using. I used to imagine that a terabyte of RAID storage on one P4 machine with ordinary cheap IDE cards with software RAID would be feasible. I believe it is not (although I cannot afford to play musical motherboards).
> > My machine locks solid at unpredictable intervals with no response > > from keyboard lights, no Alt-Sysrq-x response, etc, with a wide > > variety of 2.4.x kernels, including 2.4.22. > > A freeze in an IRQ handler would cause that kind of thing, turning on > the NMI watchdog might get you a trace in such a failure case - and > that would help.
If the NMI count is positive in /proc/interrupts, and I have nmi_watchdog=2 in /proc/cmdline, does that mean that the NMI watchdog is turned on? If so, it never yielded anything: the machine also never responded to keyboard lights, Alt-Sysrq-s, etc. I have a serial terminal (minicom on an old 486 with a capture log running) as my console, since I want to catch the culprit. I always checked console output up to the lock up. $ sudo grep -c 'syslogd 1.4.1: restart.' messages* messages:13 messages.1:9 messages.2:4 messages.3:6 messages.4:4 That's a lot of locking up! A careful look through the output of $ sudo grep -B10 'syslogd 1.4.1: restart.' messages* shows no output from the watchdog.
I am giving up now, and have shelled out big dollars for a 3ware 7506-8, which I will install early next week once I've figured out how to back up and restore 203GB without shelling out even more money.
I am honoured by your reply! Have fun with the MBA.
-- Nick Urbanik RHCE nicku(at)vtc.edu.hk Dept. of Information & Communications Technology Hong Kong Institute of Vocational Education (Tsing Yi) Tel: (852) 2436 8576, (852) 2436 8713 Fax: (852) 2436 8526 PGP: 53 B6 6D 73 52 EE 1F EE EC F8 21 98 45 1C 23 7B ID: 7529555D GPG: 7FFA CDC7 5A77 0558 DC7A 790A 16DF EC5B BB9D 2C24 ID: BB9D2C24
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