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Date:      Sat, 18 Mar 2006 14:01:06 +0100
From:      Tomas Randa <lists@hosting50.cz>
To:        freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Motherboard for new Socket 939 fileserver
Message-ID:  <441C0492.5090007@hosting50.cz>
In-Reply-To: <44172AC5.8070400@skyhawk.ca>
References:  <44172AC5.8070400@skyhawk.ca>

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Hello,

my suggestions:

Disable Spread Spectrum in BIOS
Upgrade to latest RELENG_6
Connect SATA drives on chipset SATA ports.
Do not use Nvidia RAID for mirror, disable it in BIOS and use FreeBSD
PseudoRAID - ataraid with FreeBSD metadata, for RAID1 is not necessarily
use RAID capable controller, simply do atacontrol create RAID1 ad4 ad6
etc...

Tomas Randa

Andrew Fremantle napsal(a):

> Hi all,
>
> I've been tasked with setting up a new FreeBSD network file server. 
> I've been spending the last day fighting an ASUS A8N-VM CSM 
> motherboard, and I've given up on that hopeless battle. The ACPI is 
> horribly broken, the ethernet and PATA/SATA aren't supported on 
> FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE, FreeBSD 6-STABLE recognises the disk controllers 
> but then hits a bug that prevents it from using one of the disks, I've 
> had enough. I was prepared to tough it out with the ATA/33 limit on 
> the generic controller support, until a future release properly 
> supports them, but this morning the machine started throwing "DANGER 
> Will Robinson" messages regarding the SATA drives.
>
> I have a preference for nVidia chipsets, but if there's something else 
> that will work and has decent FreeBSD support I'll take it.
>
> Here are my requirements
> Socket 939
> At least four SATA headers
> (preferably) At least two PATA headers
> PCIe Gigabit Ethernet
>
> Reliable ATA system operation on the board is a MUST! This machine's 
> primary purpose is going to be reading and writing those drives! Those 
> damned UDMA timeouts and other ATA problems I've seen cropping up 
> randomly over the last two years are NOT acceptable.
>
> After troubleshooting the nVidia RAID on this motherboard, and reading 
> online about these "fake RAID" implementations, I'm pretty much 
> planning on sticking with FreeBSD's "Pseudo-RAID". Can anyone offer 
> any feedback on the reliability of FreeBSD's "Pseudo-RAID" system?
>
> Just in case anyone's interested, here are the rest of the components 
> that will be used with the system.
> Seasonic 430w S12 powersupply
> Western Digital 80G PATA drive
> Pioneer PATA DVD Multidrive
> 2 x Seagate 7200.9 300GB SATA drives (mirrored) in
> a SNT-3141-SATA 4-drive SATA enclosure (Not sure who made this)
>
> Any feedback would be much appreciated. I'm desperate to avoid jumping 
> to Linux on this one, because I know that will turn into a huge pain 
> in the ass later on.
>
> - Andrew
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