Comments on: All hardware sucks.

By: tubesocksandals

tubesocksandals — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 19:36:19 +0000

Most, that is, not all.

When I bought an IBM x306m (1U) to replace my co-loc box, it came with an internal RAID card. The IBM guy and their website made it look like the integrated RAID card was the same one that we bought for our x346’s (which are spiffy – let you rebuild/expand RAID online from RAID 5 to RAID 1 for example). As it turned out, this was totally false. It was a piece of crap Adaptec for-which there were no open drivers. This meant installing my kernel with binary drivers just to access my disk, which was something I was not willing to do. The idea of having to choose between running an exploitable kernel or having access to my hard drives while I wait for someone at Adaptec to rebuild isn’t all that appealing for some reason.

The even dumber part… These drives were connected to the mother board via the RAID card. No RAID == No disks. When I had found this out (after the unit had shipped, late as always, thanks IBM!), I was fuming mad. Fortunately, I could simply remove the hot-swap back-plane the drives were connected to and run SATA cables to the two SATA ports on the motherboard. The box is now running software RAID very happily, and I don’t have any binary drivers.

By: brianenigma

brianenigma — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 22:17:40 +0000

I don’t know about the rest of the hardware stuff anymore, as I’ve been suckered by the ease of Mac hardware with it’s nice pre-built services and the continuing porting of Open Source apps and daemons to Darwin, but I can comment on the RAID. Yes! RAID-1 is the way to go, especially in the home and especially if future budget could be an issue. Yanking out a drive and mounting it on another machine to pull off that data you need at the last minute is *MUCH* more convenient than trying to find/obtain/buy a drive of equal or greater size, plug it into the RAID-5, and pray that everything works itself out–especially if the bank account at the time of the crash is a bit low and/or the computer stores have closed for the day.

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:36:56 +0000

(Oh, and I remember that thing from brad — but my requirements are a lot more relaxed than his. It’s more archival storage than anything. Even still, I’m not going to touch the hardware RAID from the sounds of things!)

By: leolo

leolo — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:33:26 +0000

Caught!

Actually, I meant “buy pre-made.” A grey-box from a mom-and-pop would probably be just as reliable.

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:33:06 +0000

It's better in this case because my local cheap disk place matches prices for PATA and SATA -- so there's really no advantage to buying PATA now for me.

By: Rich

Rich — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 21:31:24 +0000

Hey, you’re the one all going “just buy from this megacorporation”! :D

By: leolo

leolo — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:45:41 +0000

You and your capitalist logic!

By: wisedonkey

wisedonkey — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:19:41 +0000

Apparently, Adaptec does too. Their raid controllers are nothing more than an embedded pc running vxworks.

By: wisedonkey

wisedonkey — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:10:07 +0000

Less demand + less produced + older expensive production methods = higher cost

By: sherm

sherm — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 20:02:37 +0000

Brad basically proved that all RAID controllers are total shit ;). Too lazy to find the link now, but you probably remember it. My experience with builtin ones is that they're utter, total shit. Intel isn't even building them into the ICH8 chipset, so the MB companies are putting super-cheap ones in just to check that off the feature list. You could always do cheapss-old-thing and PATA. Is SATA really that much better for this application?