[Beowulf] GPFS on Linux (x86)

[Craig Tierney]

Brent Franks wrote:
> 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.
> 

My 'be wary' was not to be wary of the disks, but of what the
vendor said.  For my applications, the SATA arrays we installed
worked great.  I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them, but the 
performance was a bit less than our other scsi array (but not
worth the price difference.

Craig


> 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.
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