On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 07:41:08AM +1200, Joel Wiramu Pauling wrote:
1) Your power supply is far too weak... especially with 2 proc in you need at LEAST 26Amps on the 12+ volt power rail. (I doubt you 360 watt is anywhere near this). Use a Toppower 450Watt or Enermax PSU. 360W is definitely too thin.
The 12 volt rail shows 17A... I was thinking that with no GPU that would be enough. But you've given me something to think about now.
2) The OCZ ram you have will not work with this board. OCZ is designed for Single proc performance level enthusiast boards, and has very tweaked and high CAS timmings. This board is a server board, and does not work well (at all...) with the OCZ pc3200 ecc reged ram. I made the same mistake when first purchacing and got... many...many problems. I have a number of threads open with OCZ/MSI/2cpu forums on this issue... Scrap the OCZ ram. Get Samsung pc400 ecc ram. I did and I get MUCH MUCH more stabler operation (samsung adheres to jdec standards and therefore is cas 3 at pc3200 not cas 2 like corsair/mushkin/ocz)
Hmm, I know that could be a problem, but I don't think it's what I have to deal with right at the moment. After reading through others' problems, it really seems like I have to do some more before my hard drives to work correctly, and that's the bulk of the problem at the moment, although other instabilities might be tied to the RAM. Note that I had FreeBSD installed on one of these machines for a while, and didn't have any trouble with it.... I just couldn't get MySQL to run on more than one processor.
3) The Raid on this MOBO is software only.... Disable all arrays through the vt8xxx bios util (hit tab at startup). Then use Linux software raid through yast to setup the array. I get Better performance using linux software raid than I do from the Via windows driver designed by the manufacturer... (I use 2 hitachi 160gbs drives, with raptors should should get even better).
I set up the OS on Linux software RAID. I didn't mess with the VIA BIOS after I realized that it was a software raid and required drivers. My problem now is getting the SATA recognized as SATA, I think. My drives are still showing up as hda and hdc rather than sd# like they should, right? Thanks for your help... I've read more than a couple of your messages :) I hope this can be worked out soon. BW