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On Fri, 29 Jan 2010, Rob Beard wrote:
Could it be a case of a dodgy motherboard, or just plain bad luck?
Scratching my head there. The mobo is: http://uk.asus.com/Search.aspx?SearchKey=P5QL-CMI got it mostly because: It's ASUS, on-board graphics, (at least) 2 SATA ports and supported the processor I was after. It was also in the budget range of what the client specified.
Looks like there's been one BIOS update for it though: Description 1. Enhance system stability. Hmm...
So I'm now revising my plans - I need to get a new server up there by the end of Feb, but I'm not going to make a mad dash up there now (Sheffield) - I'll build and test this new server, then when I go up, take new SATA cables, and new drives and give it a good testing while I'm up there installing the new server.That's good then, I guess that is one of the pitfalls of hosting in Sheffield, the long distance to travel, but I guess things like this are a fairly rare occurence?
Fortunately they are rare. In 6 years of hosting in Sheffield I've only visited it 6 times, and 3 of those were in 2008 when I made some major changes. I used to courrier servers up there, but after having one mashed by UPS, I drive them now, so the only times I go are generally to take a new server, or upgrade an existing one.
Failures out of about 20 servers in & out - fans failling. Generally not an issue now as CPU fans are more reliable than they were and we can monitor them, and I use big and airy boxes that don't really need case fans, motherboard failling (one, a Dell!) disks failling (had bad sectors on a few, but no total drive failures), motherboard batterys failling - makes that reboot after 3 years of uptime somewhat "intersting" :)
And an Ethernet switch died on me too. (a DLink 24-port thing - now replaced by a Cisco)
It's a funny old thing, hosting. I'd build my own mini DC if I could afford a pair of diversely routed 10Mb lines (to start with - I'm peaking at 20Mb/sec out of my little network now) and I might be at the front of the Q if a a proper DC were to open in the south west, but sometimes I wonder if it's worth it....
One thing I have noticed - there seems to be a lack of places openly advertising SATA II cables, ...
I had a look at eBuyer.com and came up with this... Startech latching SATA cable: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/141695 According to the specs it is SATA 150/300.
OK. Will have a look at that, thanks.
If I see any when I'm browsing I'll let you know, although I was pretty certain at least on SATA/SATA2 that the cables are all now pretty much SATA2. Can't say about SATA3 as I haven't had the chance to check out any SATA3 drives or controllers yet.
The drives I have in this box are very fast - can stream reads at over 100MB/sec so we're approaching SATA I speeds already...
# hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing cached reads: 4262 MB in 2.00 seconds = 2132.81 MB/sec Timing buffered disk reads: 338 MB in 3.00 seconds = 112.58 MB/sec and # dd if=/dev/sda3 of=/dev/null bs=8M 502+1 records in 502+1 records out 4211343360 bytes (4.2 GB) copied, 37.0979 s, 114 MB/s Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html