[plug] handling failed non-redundant storage in a server

[Brad Campbell]

Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-02-12 at 13:05, Brad Campbell wrote:
> 
> 
>>I found for a quick and dodgy solution while having temporarily connected high speed drives.
>>I prop the drive up with a matchbox at each end (electrical insulation while providing a void under 
>>the drive) and sit an 80mm low speed fan pointing at it. This keeps the disk shell to within about 
>>10 degrees of ambient under a full sustained load.
> 
> 
> Interesting, if kind of scary. I'm going to see if I can find a cage
> (with cooling) for SATA drives first, because it'd be nice to be able to
> avoid having to plug in and unplug the drive each time I want to swap it
> anyway.
> 
> Given that SATA drives appear to have identical power and data connector
> positions, all that'd really be needed would be a "drive socket" - a 5
> 1/4 bay that you could slide a drive into, with fans for airflow and
> connectors positioned properly at the back. No need for the old PATA or
> SCSI-style drive cages. I wonder if something like that is available...

http://www.addonics.com (And they have a local distributor in Aus)
I am awaiting 3 of their removable sata caddies and a sata cardbus interface from the States. I'll 
let you know what they are like when they hit deck.
They are pretty groovy as they play as a removable caddy, but double as an external enclosure with a 
decent cooling solution built in. Not quite what you are after but cheap enough and you can buy just 
the individual components separately.

>>These new Maxtor Maxline-II SATA drives are only detected as UDMA-33 under the stock kernel HPT366 
>>driver (HPT374 card) and I can get at most about 15Mb/s to and from them.
>>Using the Highpoint driver module compiled from source without the binary only raid module I can get 
>>full speed to and from the drive. (About 20Mb/s sustained write and 50Mb/s read)
> 
> 
> I'm seeing the latter numbers here - quite decent performance. Hence, in
> part, the overheating. I'm using Maxline Plus II SATA (7200rpm) drives,
> attached to a 3ware 8500-8 controller. It was, in fact, one of those
> that caused this little incident.

Yeah, I have mine in a Supermicro SATA drive cage, which is a little noisy but keeps the drives 
within a couple of degrees of ambient. In a 1.4TB array, drive death is my biggest fear.

I'm too cheap (And this is only a home entertainment server) to buy expensive controllers, I guess 
I'm suffering for my (false?) economy.

However, the Highpoint driver works and the in-kernel driver does not. Given I have the source, I 
should be able to see what the Highpoint driver is doing differently and make the in-kernel driver 
do the same thing.
I wish libsata would support the hpt chipset :p|

Regards,
Brad