Recommendations for servers running SATA drives [hot-swap]

[Miroslav Lachman]

Gavin Atkinson wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-09-29 at 15:43 +0200, Miroslav Lachman wrote:
> 
>>Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>>
>>
>>>On Sat, Sep 27, 2008 at 03:16:11PM -0400, Charles Sprickman wrote:
>>>
>>>I've successfully done a hot-swap (hardware: SATA hot-swap backplane,
>>>AHCI in use, SATA2 disks), but it required me to issue "atacontrol
>>>detach" first (I am very curious to know what would've happened had I
>>>just yanked the disk).  Upon inserting the new disk, one has to be
>>>*very* careful about the order of atacontrol commands given -- there
>>>are cases where "attach" will cause the system to panic or SATA bus to
>>>lock up, but it seems to depend upon what commands were executed
>>>previously (such as "reinit").
>>>
>>>Sorry if this is off-topic, but I wanted to mention it.
>>
>>Hot-swapping is totally upredictable on FreeBSD (from my experiences). I 
>>tried it many times on Asus 1U servers and on Sun Fire X2100 / X2100 M2 
>>with FreeBSD 6.2 and 7.0 (both i386).
> 
> 
> I can't speak for the Dell, but I can at least say that at least on the
> X2100, not even Solaris supports either hot-swapping or the built in
> software RAID.  When they were first released the advertising said that
> they had these, but those claims was quietly removed from the website
> some weeks after release.  Short answer: give up on hot-swap the X2100.
> 
> As for the X2100 M2, that is supposed to support it, and I believe it
> works fine for us under Solaris.  I'm not sure if I've got any spare
> M2's here, if so I'll have a play.

It was about year ago with Asus and Sun Fire X2100. I don't have Asus 
servers now (all returned as reclamation). Now I am running one X2100 
and about ten X2100 M2. I have one spare X2100 M2, so if somebody have 
exact order of commands used to "hot-swap" the disk, I can test it in 
few days.

Miroslav Lachman