Well, I've finally completed the upgrades on my server. At least one of the disks in the RAID array was starting to go bad, so I ordered new ones Wednesday and did some emergency surgery all day Saturday.
Thankfully, I'm using a 3Ware card (I can't say enough good things about these) and we had a spare one at work they let me borrow, so I hooked the old drives up to work's card, and then hooked the new ones up to my existing RAID card, and did the transfer. Copying everything over took probably 10 hours, somewhere in there I went to bed. =)
This morning I picked up my stuff I ordered from QuietPC.com -- I replaced the power supply and CPU fan with their QuietPC counterparts, and then put sound-dampening material all around the case. The difference is STAGGERING. I've got the machine in my living room (since that's where the DSL line comes in). It is *so* much quieter, I can barely hear the thing when it's on now, and it's pretty much invisible when the TV's going.
On a side note, I had originally planned on replacing the drives *and* the RAID card with the Promise SX4000 after reading a number of reviews saying how it beats the 3Ware ATA RAID cards. I foolishly didn't do enough research and bought the thing, and it turns out it's a great card -- if you're running Windows. The Linux drivers are crap, and Alan Cox has said a number of disparaging things about them (and Promise's Linux support in general) over time -- I should have known better. Anyways, the card is worthless under Linux, I plan on putting it (and the remaining undamaged drives from server) in my Window box since you wouldn't notice the unreliability there anyways. Perhaps the SX stands for "sux".
Went out to buy the SX4000 controller even though many people warned me about Promise’s lack of Linux Support.
Using the RedHat 8.0 (2.4.18-3) driver worked fine in my SlackWare 8.1 (2.4.18) installation. The server was up a couple of weeks. Last Thursday my CPU went to heaven (it was an old Celeron 300A@450) The Raid was abruptly (kernel panics) stopped a couple of times. A couple of errors on the ext2 filesystem was all…
My 2.4.18 kernel was very unhappy with the new cpu and motherboard and I was forced to upgrade to 2.4.20.
Tested running the old 2.4.18-3 SX4000 Driver on a new 2.4.20 kernel and everything works fine again. I’m happy 🙂
I just bought an sx4000 on the basis of the packaging (replacing a broken controller). This thing is a pain in the ass when it comes to linux drivers, and the company has made a name for themselves — in the negative.
NEVER EVER BUY PROMISE FOR LINUX. You’ll regret it. Cough up the dough or do a google on software raid and use that (I think I’m just going to use software, as 3ware, for all it’s quality, is overpriced).