HP Workstation xw4200 Linux SATA or SCSI

[Dave Geiger]

Hi Guys,

I have decided to buy the following
HP Workstation xw4200 Linux SATA and comes with
Red Hat Linux WS 3, 32-bit. I would like to know if I can upgrade it to Red Hat EL 4.There is also there is another HP Workstation xw4200 Linux SSCI for $200 more.So I would like to know which would be a good fit.I would like to know if there is any compatability issues in SATA.

The Configuation of HP Workstation xw4200 Linux SATA:

HP Workstation xw4200 Linux SATA
HP Workstation xw4200
Red Hat Linux WS 3, 32-bit
Intel® Pentium® 4 2.80GHz/1MB 800FSB
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 280 64 PCI-E
512MB (2x256) DDR2-533 ECC unb
80GB SATA 1.5Gb/s 7200 (1st)
48X CD-ROM
No Floppy Disk Kit
HP PS/2 Standard Keyboard
HP PS/2 Scroll Mouse
HP xw4200 Localization kit
Software Technical Support, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3

Thanks
Dave

[Steven E. Protter]

Early sata support was weak in some Linux distributions. Because they don't have $40 billion in the bank, it takes time for hardware to be tested, included on the compatability list.

You need to check with the specific provider of hardware and check if Red Hat supports it.

If they don't support it, don't do it.

SEP

[Philippe Vervoort · Accepted solution]

Dave,

We use xw4100's with pretty the same configuration as your xw4200 and we run SuSE 9.3 Linux without any problem. Sata is well supported in SuSE. Not sure how things are in RedHat...

Greetings,
Philippe

[Gopi Sekar]

My Desktop runs on SATA disk (hp compaq dc7100) and so far it is working perfectly fine under Fedora core 4(i have been using it from the day FC4 is released).

I believe SCSI has some added advantage over SATA(i am not sure about performance difference), but it is costlier in terms of initial cost and upgrade cost(just incase you want to go from 40GB to 80GB).

So if you are looking at some serious production server then go for SCSI because it is proven and has been there for a long time, SATA is relatively new but works out to be cheaper compared to SCSI.

Hope this helps,
Gopi

[rcmikey]

Hello,

With regards to your questions:

1) SATA is supported in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on the xw4200, there should not be any compatability issues.

2) You can upgrade from RHEL 3 to RHEL 4. You can also install either 32-bit or 64-bit RHEL. If deploying on to a new system, I recommend doing a "clean install". The installer kit CD for RHEL 4 update 1 (which contains drivers and some packages required by the xw4200) is available from the "Software and Drivers Download" page of the xw4200, which can be reached from www.hp.com. It is a CD-ROM .iso image, and is used after the install of the retail RHEL 4 Update 1 software when prompted for "additional CD's".

[Ivan Ferreira]

SCSI has better performance than SATA:

SCSI (Ultra 360) - 360 MB/s
SATA - 150 MB/s

[Dave Falloon]

Dave,

If you need hotswap capabilities then scsi is your only bet. The libata kernel drivers currently do not support hot swap, as of sept. 9 Lukasz Kosewski ( the libata hotswap author ) had not released any of his patches for beta support for promise controllers. Serial ATA is currently supported for your basic disk functions though. If you are counting on the full implementation of the SATA spec then you should go with the scsi hardware.

I am running SATA boxes and SCSI boxes, and for disk operations I find them fairly comparable ( U320 scsi is faster ). The added expense of scsi has changed my preference to SATA, though.

--Dave