On 02/10/11 01:44, JK Scheinberg wrote: [...] > Yeah my SheevaPlug doesn't have eSATA, I have a USB SDD on it. It's pretty > solid but does go offline every few weeks. I've been unable to determine why > so far
Rumour has it that the Kirkwood USB chipset is a bit dodgy. Certainly, I've had problems. I run cowlark.com off a SheevaPlug, which does routing/email/website/IMAP/spam filtering etc, even running a Java servlet. As a result I have a lot of devices hanging off the single USB port; four USB keys (RAIDed into a 64GB SSD), a spinning hard drive, and an ethernet adaptor. It turns out that it's very sensitive as to the ordering and type of the USB devices. It took me about a week of experimentation before I found the combination of sockets that would run stably; otherwise I'd get I/O errors, devices would drop off mysteriously, or other issues. I have a D-Link 7-port USB hub that wouldn't work at all, while cheaper 4-port hubs were fine. As it is, U-Boot simply can't find the boot device reliably so I have to boot from the SD card, and every now and again while under load the ethernet adaptor simply stops generating interrupts (so I have to remove and reinsert it. Note that the internal gigabit ethernet works flawlessly). Has anyone else seen anything like this? (And yes, it all does work fine when plugged into something that's not the SheevaPlug. And yes, all the USB hubs are externally powered.) I was interested in the GuruPlug, with its extra ports and eSATA, until I read about the heat problems; so the DreamPlug with its power supply redesign looks very nice. Incidentally, people might be interested to see: http://www.cowlark.com/graphs/ That's some system stats on cowlark.com's SheevaPlug. In particular, if you look at the UPS load, you can see the external hard drive spin up and down. It's interesting that the hard drive uses about 2/3 of the energy of the entire rest of the hardware stack: ADSL router, SheevaPlug, several USB hugs, WRT54GL... -- ┌─── ｄｇ＠ｃｏｗｌａｒｋ．ｃｏｍ ───── http://www.cowlark.com ───── │ "Thou who might be our Father, who perhaps may be in Heaven, hallowed │ be Thy Name, if Name Thou hast and any desire to see it hallowed..." │ --- _Creatures of Light and Darkness_, Roger Zelazny
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