[rescue] Blade 100

[Bryan Gurney]

On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 23:42:27 -0400, velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com>  
wrote:

>> >>I'd also advise getting away from the on-board IDE if you can.  1) it
>> >>can't handle bigger than 120GB (addressing issue), and 2) it's slower
>> >>than frozen molasses.  Anything less than 256MB and you'll be swearing
>> >>at it...
>> >>
>> >>At the very least, a second faster IDE and pointing swap to the
>> >>original is a must in my mind.
>> >
>> >is there any reason to keep the stock 15gig drive, and not to replace  
>> it with
>> >something substantially larger and faster?  or move it to the slave  
>> position
>> >after installing a better master drive?
>>
>> The controller chip is slow, no software can really make it better than  
>> it is in Solaris 10 > (I think there was a patch early on because the  
>> software was broken too). Adding a
>> faster drive will simply allow you to "max out" theslow performance of  
>> the bad
>> controller implementation.
> Thinks pre-DMA speeds.  My understanding is that the DMA
> implementation on the Blade 100's is severely broken.  In fact, if
> running Linux on it, you have to completely disable DMA mode, or you
> *will* get a corrupted boot file system.  (Oddly, it only seems to
> affect the boot partition, not data partitions.

Wow, that sounds bad.  I know that the Ultra 5 has a CMD IDE controller,  
and it's certainly not a speed demon, but is it THIS bad as well?  I'm  
planning on getting my U5 running with a WD 80 GB 7200 RPM drive.