When I bought all of this equipment included in it was a server, P3 866mhz, 512mb PC133 ECC, 3×18gb Ultra160 SCSI drives in Raid 5. I was unable to get Slackware to boot from the install disc and I was beating my head against the wall trying to get it to work. I tried CentOS 5, but the video card seems to be incompatible with Anaconda and if I am going to do a text install it is going to be Slackware. I tried boot disks and kept getting errors and prompts to put in floppy disks. After no luck online I looked at the DVD and saw the rootdisks folder and installed the sbootmgr.dsk image on a floppy. That boot disk will allow you to boot from any disc even if the bios won’t allow it or fails to boot for one reason or another. It worked and I am installing Slackware 11 right now.

I always knew there were jumpers on some SATA drives, but I never took the time to see what they did. Recently I had a problem with a friends computer where we couldn’t get the drive to recognize and the reason was that there was no jumper setting it to a SATA I. I was setting up an RMA for a Seagate today and noticed that all my Seagate SATA II drives had jumpers on set to SATA I. According to h2benchw the 500 is running faster in some cases than the Raptor :(.

Western Digital Raptor 150
h2benchw -english -c 2 0
sequential read rate medium (w/out delay): 81.4 MByte/s
sequential transfer rate w/ read-ahead (delay: 0.84 ms): 102.9 MByte/s
Repetitive sequential read ("core test"): 115.2 MByte/s

Seagate 500
h2benchw -english -c 2 2
sequential read rate medium (w/out delay): 72.2 MByte/s
sequential transfer rate w/ read-ahead (delay: 0.95 ms): 134.2 MByte/s
Repetitive sequential read ("core test"): 129.1 MByte/s