[geeks] Dell T105 server arrives

[ericj]

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008 14:27:16 -0400, Joshua Boyd wrote


> Actually, I spoke a bit to hastily.  The above is true.
> 
> However, I also get poor performance when connected via an IDE-
> >CF interface.
> 
> I am using Kingston brand cards.  So far I have seen at least three
> brands of chips in the production cards.  I am using the plain 
> regular speed cards.  I have a few samples of high speed cards,
>  but depending on variables that I can't remeber all of, the 
> "fast" cards went the same speed, slower, or failed to boot 
> because of IO errors.
> 
> My opinion is that what is going on is some sort of clash 
> between CF not quite being just like a plain IDE device, and 
> Linux not using the cards as well as it could.
> 
> In particular, I can never turn on DMA with these things.
> 
> According to the documentation from kingston (which is 
> actually fairly thick) even the slow cards should go a lot 
> faster, and the fast cards should probably equal or out do 
> harddrives for our application.
> 
> So, I also have a sample of an IDE flash device that 
> specifically claims to be more compatible than CF cards.  In 
> particular, it claims to support UDMA.  I haven't had time to 
> try this device yet, but I have high hopes for it.  It plugs 
> straight into the IDE slot, so I don't have to run an IDE 
> cable anywhere or mount an adapter/card holder anywhere. I 
> hope to finally have time to play with it in the next two 
> weeks. 

In my experience at a previous place, the Kingston cards (standard, not
whatever their "ultra gold, super photography" version might be) are
pretty much worst of breed. We even had better experience with
MicroCenter plain label cards. Along with speed issues, we encountered
Kingston cards that almost immediately got corrupted. The only solution
we found was to partition them much smaller than the 512MB size of the
card so there was room for the controller to do it's error recovery and
load balancing things. They did save the purchasing people a buck a
card, though.

--

"Facts are the enemy of truth." -- Don Quixote

Eric Johnson