The Edge10 DAS 501t -- redux
After a couple of delays, my replacement Edge10 DAS 501t has arrived. Why a replacement? The first one refused to power on.
I eagerly unpacked it, plugged it in, pressed the power switch… and got nothing. Again. This was exactly the same fault as last time. In a state of bemusement (and a little irritation), I phoned up the supplier, who also expressed their confusion over the state of affairs, confirmed that there was no physical way they could have shipped the same unit back to me, and suggested I call Edge10 again. So I did.
After talking briefly to someone entirely non-technical, and asking to be escalated to someone who knew the hardware, I was put through to one of Edge10’s technical people. I explained the problem to him, and he said:
It's a new model, and there's been a manufacturing fault on the first batch – they tied one of the cable ties too tightly, and the power button cable falls out during shipping. If you undo the three screws for the cover, take the cover off, and look on the right hand side of the box, you can see the cables from the power switch and the power LED. Check that the cables are properly seated, and see if that helps.
So I did. Screws out, cover off… both cables had fallen out during shipping. Putting them in was tricky – the cables were indeed very tight. Snipping the cable tie around the bundle of cables from the PSU gave me a lot more slack, and it was then easy to put the two leads back on. Cover on, screws back in… and it all powers up nicely.
I can’t say much more about the physical properties of the box that I didn’t say before. It feels like a nice solid piece of kit. It’s also very quiet, thanks to the ginormous (120mm) fan on the back.
I’d already put a disk into it and plugged it into the server when I turned it on. The server spent about 10 seconds of confusion in the system logs:
Jan 29 14:49:16 vlad kernel: ata5: exception Emask 0x10 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x4050000
action 0xe frozen
Jan 29 14:49:16 vlad kernel: ata5: irq_stat 0x00400040, connection status change
d
Jan 29 14:49:16 vlad kernel: ata5: SError: { PHYRdyChg CommWake DevExch }
Jan 29 14:49:16 vlad kernel: ata5: hard resetting link
Jan 29 14:49:17 vlad kernel: ata5: SATA link up 3.0 Gbps (SStatus 123 SControl 3
00)
Jan 29 14:49:17 vlad kernel: ata5.15: Port Multiplier 1.1, 0x1095:0x3726 r23, 6
ports, feat 0x1/0x9
Jan 29 14:49:17 vlad kernel: ata5.00: hard resetting link
Jan 29 14:49:18 vlad kernel: ata5.00: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 310)
[...]
Eventually, it reset all of the SATA channels, and found the hard disk:
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: scsi 4:4:0:0: Direct-Access ATA ST380013AS
3.18 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: sd 4:4:0:0: [sdf] 156301488 512-byte hardware secto
rs (80026 MB)
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: sd 4:4:0:0: [sdf] Write Protect is off
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: sd 4:4:0:0: [sdf] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: sd 4:4:0:0: [sdf] Write cache: enabled, read cache:
enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: sdf: unknown partition table
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: sd 4:4:0:0: [sdf] Attached SCSI disk
Jan 29 14:49:29 vlad kernel: sd 4:4:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg6 type 0
It Just Works. I have a fully working /dev/sdf, running in the storage box:
hrm@vlad:~ $ ls /dev/sd* /dev/sda /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 hrm@vlad:~ $ sudo cfdisk /dev/sdf [...] hrm@vlad:~ $ sudo mkfs -t xfs /dev/sdf1 [...] hrm@vlad:~ $ sudo mount /dev/sdf1 /media/test hrm@vlad:~ $ cd /media/test/ hrm@vlad:test $ time dd if=/dev/zero of=foo.test bs=1M count=10240 10240+0 records in 10240+0 records out 10737418240 bytes (11 GB) copied, 199.183 seconds, 53.9 MB/s real 3m19.219s user 0m0.050s sys 1m1.730s
Bear in mind for the “speed test” that this is only an “old” 80GiB Seagate drive I had knocking around. It’s somewhere around the 7200.7 or 7200.8 vintage, I think, so I’m getting full speed out of the single drive.
Happy!
Thanks go to Paul and the other unnamed chap I spoke to at Edge10 (sorry, I didn’t get your name) for their assistance in sorting out the problem. Lee at CCI Distribution also deserves a mention for being helpful and amazingly responsive to emails.