Dear Diary,
today I was rummaging through the drawers in the office, and I happened upon an SSD there. It was a Corsair Force 3, which is a SATA 3.0 disk! Yay! I can finally do some benchmarking, I thought.
I put the SSD into the server and switched it on, but it came up as a 3Gbps device. And there were only four ports visible, even though there’s six headers on the motherboard. Just look:
After fiddling around in the BIOS a bit (I had to switch off IDE emulation and “combined mode”, whatever that is), all six ports appeared in Linux:
By all that’s holy! By Emacs! I misread the specifications on the motherboard! It says “6x SATA2 3.0 Gbps Ports”, not “6x SATA 3.0 ports”!
Diary, it turns out that Supermicro has absolutely no SATA3 motherboards.
Instead of turning to drink, despair and vi, as some might do, I turned to the browser and ordered a low-profice PCI Express SATA 3 card instead. The reviews says that it’s supposed to play well with SSDs, too, and has realish hardware RAID. I know that I earlier vowed never to use anything but soft RAID again after many dissappointing experiences with cheap-ish hardware RAID setups, but surely this time there won’t be any problems.
Fingers crossed!
(Continue reading my secret diary.)