problem with brand new Dell Precision R7610 workstation and Fedora 19

[lee]

Franki <franki at biz.uwa.edu.au> writes:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been asked to set up a Dell R7610 workstation dual booting
> windows 8 and Fedora 19.
>
> The machine in question has a Xeon E5-2687W with 20MB L2,  128 Gig of
> ram, and 4 x 10k hard disk which I've put into a stiped RAID 0 array
> using the onboard "Integrated: LSI 2308 6Gb/s SATA, SAS controller
> that supports RAID 0, 1, 10"

see http://cateee.net/lkddb/web-lkddb/SCSI_MPT2SAS.html


,----
| [root at yun ~]# grep MPT2SAS /boot/config-3.9.9-301.fc19.x86_64 
| CONFIG_SCSI_MPT2SAS=m
| CONFIG_SCSI_MPT2SAS_MAX_SGE=128
| CONFIG_SCSI_MPT2SAS_LOGGING=y
| [root at yun ~]#
`----


Perhaps the required module isn't loaded for some reason, maybe it's not
in the inird image.  Maybe it needs to be compiled in, maybe it's buggy
--- or grub cannot access the root partition for some reason.

> If I do need a new raid card, can anyone recommend a SAS2/SATA3 PCI-e 
> card?  The dell website for the R7610 lists this card as an option:
>
> LSI 8271-8i 6Gb/s SATA, SAS hardware RAID controller with 1GB onboard
> cache supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 10

I looked at the LSI website and it sucks so badly that I wouldn't want
to buy any of their controllers.  Maybe something from HP works.

Other than that, it depends on what you need.

> But I'm not familiar with it and don't know how it will work with
> Fedora either.

A HP smart array P800 works great, though I don't know if it would work
in your particular server.  It's probably technologically rather
outdated and supports physical disks no larger than 2TB each, so it
might not at all be what you'd be looking for.

Perhaps you can add another disk not connected to the RAID controller
just for booting.  With RAID-0, you don't have any redundancy anyway.


-- 
Fedora release 19 (Schrödinger’s Cat)