January 15th, 2006

geeky

Lets do the disk warp again.

I've finally got an IDE HDD solution for the new cleopatra that I'm happy with – I have been using a Highpoint Rocket 100 card, but the linux HPT drivers don't support the non-RAID Rocket cards so I've been having to use the vendor supplied one which
  1. Isn't GPLed.
  2. Has to be used as a module.
So I've acquired a Silicon Image RAID card (ATA RAID cards appear to be practically dirt cheap nowadays) which after a bit of faddling seems to work and I now have a modules-free kernel again. Also, unlike the Highpoint module, the siimage module presents the drives to the kernel as IDE not SCSI meaning that the drive has been renamed from sde to hdc (for which reason I'm very glad that I used "mount by filesystem label" on this instance of cleopatra and smartctl(8) works properly.

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I think the only thing this machine needs now is some more ram, but 512MB CL3 ECC PC133 sticks are not cheap. And possibly an UPS.