Random Thoughts

Dear Diary,

today the RAID card arrived for my new server. I had apparently only ordered a single SATA cable instead of the six I had meant to order.

But it turned out that the card didn’t use normal SATA cables at all, but a weird one-to-four connector.  It’s a big connector on one side, and four separate SATA cables comes out of it.

So for once messing up the order saved me some money.

I installed the card in my 2U machine.  As you can see, those weird connectors are pretty high up on the card, which means that the cables take a rather dramatic 90 degree turn.  I hope that’s not going to cause any problems…  At least the lid closes.

I connected it all up and booted the machine.

04:00.0 RAID bus controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic MegaRAID SAS 2208 [Thunderbolt] (rev 01)

[    8.636577] megaraid_sas 0000:04:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 16
[    8.637236] megaraid_sas 0000:04:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[    8.640920] megasas: FW now in Ready state
[    8.641300] megaraid_sas 0000:04:00.0: irq 46 for MSI/MSI-X
[    8.663036] megasas:IOC Init cmd success

It works!

After fiddling aorund in the glorious and very oddly named “WebBIOS” (it’s not actually on the web at all), I managed to set up my test SSD in RAID0.  That is, a single Corsair Force 3 disk.  Apparently it doesn’t like doing JBOD…  At least, I couldn’t find any setting for it.

Writing to the device gives me 480MB/s, while reading gives me 375MB/s.  Not all that impressive, but at least is demonstrates that the old backplane really really doesn’t lead to any major problems, since that’s clearly SATA 3 speed.

Now I  just have to wait for the Samsung 830s to arrive.  Surely they can’t be serious about that horribly late arrival date… I’ll be in Rome by then…  I won’t know whether this all works until months and months from now…

Woe is me, Diary.

(Continue reading my secret diary.)

Dear Diary,

arghh!  Now the shipment date of the Samsungs has been pushed back to January 31st!  “Tentatively.”  Can I really wait that long to test the new server?

(Continue reading my secret diary.)

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.)

Dear Diary,

the Samsungs haven’t arrived yet, but they’re supposed to arrive any day now. I’m starting to wonder whether they actually exist out there, or if they are a phantom product that’s announced, but not actually shipped.

But I just looked on Newegg, for instance, and they claim to have them in stock, so they must exist.  They must!

It’s odd that they say “limit 1 per customer”, though.  And that they are more expensive in the US than in Norway.  That never happens.  I’m pretty sure when I looked earlier that they were more expensive here than there.  As they should be.

Is Samsung rationing the SSDs?

Aren’t they thinking about what the effect is on me?  They are so self-centered.

(Continue reading my secret diary.)

Dear diary,

Sinking Heat

today I got the heat sink and the RAM for the new server. I installed them and hit the power switch.

It’s alive!

I haven’t built a server in ever so long, so I’m happy and kinda surprised that it works.  The Samsung 830s I ordered haven’t arrived yet, but they’re supposed to ship in a few days.  The OS is going to be on a spinning disk, anyway, so I installed a normal Western Digital Enterprisey and untarred Debian onto it.

It still works!

SATA Galore

However, the disk performance isn’t all that great.  Since the disk is quite modern, and the motherbord is quite modern, I had expected sequential writes of 120MB/s, but I only get 105MB/s.  Boo.

To bad I don’t have any SATA3.0 disks to test with.  The spinning disk is just a 3Gbps SATA disk.  At least it means that les backplanes sont des connecteurs simples sans électronique ni intelligence.  For SATA2, at least.

Oh well.  The Samsungs will arrive any day now and I can start testing!

(Continue reading my secret diary.)