[Beowulf] GPFS on Linux (x86)

[Brent Franks]

On 9/14/06, Craig Tierney <ctierney at hypermall.net> wrote:
> I have heard some horror stories about SATA disk in raid systems and how
> vendors have to work around quirks in the SATA disks to get them to
> work ok.  They describe it as the SATA disks go 'out to lunch'
> occasionally and a disk will have a large pause before continuing.
> Those comments come from a vendor (Be wary).

We have been quite pleased with SATA disks as stated.  We did have
issues for the first two months of putting them into testing in which
we thought it was the controller, but alas it ended up just being
Maxtors.  We received another batch from maxtor, same issue.  The
maxtor would drop out of the array, the array would degrade, and
everything else undesireable would ensue.

After *finally* convincing our vendor it was Maxtor (we've had
problems w/ them before this as well) they shipped us a batch of
Seagates, and it's been operational now for quite some time.  No
sleeping drives, so far set and forget.

This, as a disclaimer, was just for our particular application.  I
will say however, that I will never buy Maxtor again.