Sun Fire X2100 -- nForce4 Ultra desktop chipset

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 14:27 +0100, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> I'm thinking about ordering a Sun Fire X2100. Has anyone
> here ran such a beast with Linux?  

It's an nForce4 Ultra chipset, not worth the money IMHO.  There are
better 1U options IMHO.  It only has PCIe.  No PCI-X (if you want
intelligent disk/redundancy).

I'm sure there are plenty of vendors/integrators on this list that can
hook you up with a nForce Professional or Broadcom ServerWorks chipset
server solution in 1U that is much better, for about the same cost.

> Does the IPMI support work?
> Does the chipset support SATA NCQ under Linux,

No.  The nForce4 doesn't support NCQ under Windows either.  It's
basically an ATA controller, only capable of SATA.  It does, however,
offer hotplug and PM support.  Driver is "nv_sata" (generic SCSI block
driver, so devices will be /dev/sda).

  http://linux.yyz.us/sata/sata-status.html#nvidia  

You'll find the many controllers do _not_ do NCQ, and even the few that
do have various issues, or just don't work under Linux with NCQ.

BTW, NCQ is fairly overrated IMHO.  For single disks, it depends on how
well your OS flushes buffers.  For multiple disks, you're now using your
host to target multiple devices, and it would be far better for an
intelligent host to control that (must like a real SCSI/SAS host does
for its targets).

The latest 3Ware 9550SX (PCI-X) and Areca 12xx (PCI-X or PCIe) series
have on-board intelligence that handles multiple targeting of NCQ SATA
devices.  If you're really anal about NCQ, then you'll want to look to
those cards.  Both are supported in Linux.

> and have you used >250 GB hard drives with the machine?

Have a pair of WD 320GB drives on this very system (nForce4).  There are
no issues with supporting them at all.

> (I've got bitten with Sun hardware lock-in once). 

These are standards-bsed AMD platforms.  They even run Windows.  Sun
doesn't advertise that, but they do.

> Is this hardware or software RAID?

Software, of course!  It's ATA FRAID (Fake RAID).  100% software driver,
only 16-bit boot-time BIOS.

Again, if you want intelligent hardware SATA raid with NCQ that works
well under Linux, consider the 3Ware 9550SX (PCI-X) or Areca 12xx (PCI-X
or PCIe).



-- 
Bryan J. Smith   b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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