I would take a close look at your motherboard's capacitors and make sure none are bulging. Additionally, it might be worth running a memtest overnight, although bad memory would only be responsible if you heavy IO also came with heavy memory usage. I run an Intel i7 desktop board (Model number doesn't come to mind) w/ 6 SATA ports/drives and bought a $40 SATA3 PCIe card for my SSD and Blueray Burner. All of this runs pretty well with a ~500W power supply Recently I purchased a Lenovo IX4-300D NAS appliance for under $200 at Amazon and migrated 4 drives and a bunch of data to it. It runs a flavor of Debian on ARM and uses linux md, is pretty quiet, and only uses a few watts. The nicest part is that if the hardware quits I know I can stick the disks in my PC. On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 3:28 PM, Matt Garman <matthew.garman@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 2:09 PM, Barrett Lewis > <barrett.lewis.mitsi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> I'm guessing that the motherboard has some problem (perhaps >> originating from the bad PSU?), and I want to switch to a dedicated >> HBA card to make this more modular. > > I had a problem with a different motherboard: my system would randomly > reboot from time to time. The motherboard was a Biostar nm70i-847, > and I found other people were having the problem too: > http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2094859 > The solution was trivial, just add "i915.i915_enable_rc6=0" to the > kernel commandline. Now that system appears to be completely stable. > > I mention this only to suggest that maybe there is some other, easily > fixable problem with your motherboard. IOW, maybe there is a cheaper > solution that doesn't require new hardware. > > You might also play with things like AHCI vs IDE mode in your BIOS... > these days, I think AHCI is generally the way to go, but it seems some > boards still ship with SATA mode set to "native" or "IDE", rather than > AHCI. > >> Stan had suggested the LSI SATA/SAS 9211-8i in many threads in the >> archives. If I use this card as my HBA, is there any particular >> motherboard which would be better suited than others? > > For home use, I use the IBM ServeRAID m1050, which I believe is a > re-branded LSI 9220-8i. I use this because they can be purchased > fairly cheap on eBay. In fact, I flash mine to "IT" mode (as opposed > to "IR" mode; IT mode removes all RAID features, and they become a > truly dumb, non-bootable HBA). > > If you care about power consumption at all, note that this card will > add about five to 10 watts of power draw to your system (depending on > your PSU's efficiency). It will also add a little bit of heat > (possibly if you have a small case, bad airflow, or live in a hot > climate with no air conditioning). > > With Linux software RAID, I think you're already "modular"; that is, > your array is already "portable" across other Linux systems with > different hardware, regardless of HBA or onboard SATA. > > The other thing I'd look out for: *some* cheap consumer motherboards > have crippled PCIe slots that only allow graphics cards to be > installed in them. I haven't seen this in a long time, but many years > ago, I found out the hard way that my non-graphics cards wouldn't work > in a (supposedly standard) PCIe slot. Hopefully the situation has > improved, as even that cheap Biostar Celeron board accepts the IBM > m1050. But, if in doubt, confirm with the manufacturer before > purchasing. > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
