Random Thoughts

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.)

Dear Diary,

There’s only one 8-pin header on the motherboard

today I got the motherboard I ordered for the new server!  I yanked the old motherboard out and put the new one in.  And it fit!  I got all the power cables, the SATA cables, and the fan cables fitted without any major problem, despite the new motherboard being a lot smaller than the old one.

But, Diary, it’s been so long since I last built a machine that I’d forgotten that there’s more parts needed than just a motherboard and a CPU.

 I’d forgotten to buy RAM and the CPU cooler. Our trusty hardware pusher ensures me that he can get a new cooler just over the weekend, so I ordered that one and some RAM for the machine.

But I so wanted to test the machine now, since I’m curious whether the old SATA1 backplane will still work with the SATA3.0 motherboard.  I think it should, but who knows?

I’ll just have to wait.

(Read the next entry from my secret diary!)