On 14/09/10 10:46, Tim Small wrote: > On 14/09/10 02:32, Adam Nielsen wrote: >> Mostly this seems to be caused by the disks being connected to an awful >> hardware RAID controller, but I don't think Dell offer any servers using >> the same onboard Intel SATA controllers that work really well on desktop >> PCs. > > As far as I know, the R210, R310 and R410 can be bought with an option > to use the onboard ICH10R SATA controller (which this generation of > servers finally enable in AHCI mode), and this is what we normally do - > but, I don't think there's an option to have them ship with hot-swap > caddies in this configuration. You can still hot swap the drives of > course, as AHCI supports this, but it's a lot more awkward to do-so. > > The Intel Server Chassis do offer AHCI with hot-swap options if you want > to go to a different server vendor, but then they have other > disadvantages (last time I looked BIOS upgrades under Linux were more > awkward than with Dell boxes). > > The only time we use hardware RAID is if the workload really needs the > low-latency writes offered by battery-backed write caching.
If you don't want to use HW raid, but want battery-backed write caching, you can use a HW controller with a battery-backed cache (PERC 6/i, H700, etc) and configure each drive as a separate RAID0 volume. R. -- "Feed that ego and you starve the soul" - Colonel J.D. Wilkes http://www.theshackshakers.com/ _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
