Recommendations for servers running SATA drives

[Gavin Atkinson]

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.

Gavin