Cfast cards on new platform.

As some of you know, in addition to Raqcop I also have an adaptation I have 
been building behind the scenes that I call Symcop for Symantec 5420 and 
other Symantec hardware gateway appliances that share similar hardware. I 
have the serial console set up properly in grub plus I built in support for 
the BCM5823 crypto accelerator that can be started in /etc/rc.d if one 
wishes.

I came across a Symantec 5620 for cheap which has two SATA ports, support 
for the later socket 478 and comes with a Celeron 2.8ghz processor and also 
has the BCM5823 crypro accelerator in addition to having the bios also 
accessible from Serial whereas the 5420 does not. The six nics on the 5420 
are all Intel 82551er chipped whereas the 5620 has six gigabit copper Intel 
ports with the two intended for wan and lan coming through a heatsink cooled 
82546GB nic and the remaining four nics have their own 82541GI chips. this 
one actually has the fans controlled by a controller with a few of them 
ducted to the cpu. 

Being the flash install fan I am, I looked into what can be done with Sata. 
Sure there are Sata to CF bridges but CF is IDE natively so what's the 
point? Might as well stick to the IDE to CF adapters. I came across Cfast 
which is the same size as a CF card but is pin for pin native Sata but with 
a special socket. I went for a few Industrial Cfast cards and a few Sata to 
Cfast adapters. Built a raid install resulting in 4GB images using 
VirtualBox and imaged the two Cfast cards and set it up. With Cfast there 
are no DMA issues at all and it booted up in a few seconds with raid working 
perfectly. 

I ran a quick test on the Cfast raid array and got:
root@zeuss:~ # hdparm -Tt /dev/md0

/dev/md0:
 Timing cached reads:   1254 MB in  2.00 seconds = 626.37 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 290 MB in  3.01 seconds =  96.35 MB/sec

The Cfast cards I have I believe are MLC based so using the flash install as 
I usually do is probably a good idea. For a normal 'Cop, having this much 
throughput on the raid array is way overkill but for some update 
accelerators, this in concert with giganics would likely be remarkable.

-- 
Dave Studeman
http://www.raqcop.com 



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