7.0 and HP Proliant DL140 G3?

[Matthew Seaman]

Ross wrote:

> I am going to buy DL140 G3 (NHP-SATA) and I want FreeBSD on it. I found some
> reports of boot loader crashes, disk and ethernet performance issues among
> with this PR:
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=i386/78339
> Most of that happened with 5.x and 6.x. Has anyone had any problems with
> 7.0-RELEASE on it?

We've a number of these machines running 7.0 -- they're generally fine,
except:

   *) There's no way of monitoring the status of the built-in mpt RAID
      (so we just configure it as a pair of drives and use gmirror)

   *) Disk IO performance is pretty bad unless you set

         hw.mpt.enable_sata_wc=1

      in /boot/loader.conf -- but be aware this could potentially lead
      to data loss given certain scenarios.  (I think this is no worse
      than the other types of drive where write caching is enabled by
      default under FreeBSD but ICBW)

You might find the freebsd-proliant at freebsd.org mailing list of interest.

	Cheers,

	Matthew


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