All the remaining parts for my 1.5 TB fileserver arrived last week, and I’m slowly getting Gentoo onto the machine, and getting the machine up and running.
The EPIA SP 13000 board I’m using for the box certainly feels much nippier than any of the VIA boards I used last year to build cheap firewalls from. That said, it’s still quite painful to compile on 
I was surprised and disappointed to find that the connector on the end of the firewire cable on my CoolerMaster Stacker isn’t compatible with the header on the motherboard. I’m not sure who is “at fault” over that. Still, it doesn’t prevent the onboard firewire port from working for now.
Been having some “fun” trying to get a driver for the HighPoint RocketRaid 1820A card working. There isn’t a driver included in the kernel source tree. HighPoint’s own driver is open source (brownie points for them), but hasn’t been updated since July, and doesn’t compile out of the box with later 2.6 kernels. There’s a problem with loading the module too, which I haven’t had time to get to the bottom of yet.
This particular SATA card uses the Marvell MV88SX5081 chipset. A quick search on Google turns up quite a few references to a Marvell GPL driver - but no obvious link to the driver itself on the Marvell website. The closest I’ve come is this page, which has details of how someone @ Edoceo managed to get a Marvell driver working on Gentoo. This driver at least loads under a 2.6.13 kernel 
Whether it actually works or not will have to wait until tomorrow.
One Comment
October 26th, 2005 at 12:00 pm
It’s noticable to me, but there again it’s sat in a very well ventilated tower case. In a more typical desktop or mini-itx case, it probably wouldn’t be that noticable.
I thought about the SP8000E, but decided on the extra performance of the SP13000.
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