NP9280... not for gaming...

Hi All.

I'm impressed with the power of the Sager NP9280 notebook. Even a little bulky, is the machine I need to do my job, a Datawarehouse consultant.

I'm going for the 12 GB DDR3 RAM, 3*500 GB 7200 RPM Raid 0 Controller (1.5 TB), intel I7 975 Extreme, single Nvidia GeForce GTX 280M (1 GB) and an external 2 TB eSata HD.

I would appreciate recommendations/feedback regarding:

- Heat generated by the notebook
- Battery duration (12 cell) (I know is relative, but just your opinion)
- Quality of the Sager support services
- Spare parts availability

I need to run this machine with RedHat Enterprise Linux 64 bit, probably Windows Server under VMWare virtual machines...

Has anyone tested it with Linux?
Is the Raid controller supported under Linux?
Does eSata port works under Linux?
Does really an external eSata device run like an internal disk?

I appologize for the amount of questions, but being a machine around US$ 5K, I do not want to take the wrong decision.

 

Don't know anything about Sager or Linux, but I can help you with a couple of your questions.

Heat - it does generate a lot of heat, but the cooling system has no trouble dealing with it.

Battery - Compared to most laptops, the D900F has a giant battery. You still won't get much more than an hours worth, for general purpose usage. Power use and gaming, a lot less. And things clock down when on battery power too, so the short answer is: Keep it plugged.

eSATA - Not sure exactly what you mean, but my LaCie external behaves exactly like if it was onboard. No lag or anything else that would give it away as an external.

 

Thank you ReduNZL.

Regarding eSata, I need to know if it behaves like a normal USB disk (I had severe problems with big USB Sata external disks under Windows and NTFS) or it really works like an internal disk connected dirctly to the disk controller (that's what eSata is for, or I'm wrong?).

Sorry for the questioins, but I'm more a SW than a HW guy...

 

Never had USB disks myself, so I couldn't tell you. All I'm saying is that my eSATA feels and behaves exactly like my internal HDD does, when accessing stuff. Or even writing - there is perhaps a very small amount of lag when compared to the internal when writing to it, but nothing I would consider an issue.
And I'm on Vista 64.

 

Hi Mike and welcome to NBR
that is one beast of a machine you have configured there.
to be honnest 12gb ram is a total waste. 4-6 will be plenty for the next year or so and then you can upgrade when the price of ram has dropped a lot.

it will get hot but with 4 (i think) fans it will be kept down.

not sure about battery life but if you arent playing games and keep it on balanced or power saver you should get it lasting a lot longer than on high performance.

 

Three fans.

 

thanks. thats why i said i think

i was only going by the pictures id seen.

 

It has 4 vents (openings), but only 3 have fans in them.

 

I purchased the Clevo D900F, which Sager offers as the 9280, and I've installed Gentoo Linux, (64 bit), and use it as my desktop. Here's my answers to your questions;

1) Heat generated by the notebook - I find it to be significant. I realize that it's a desktop CPU, but I've got my laptop on a Zalman cooler, turned up to high running all the time, and I even opened it up and reapplied new CPU and GPU thermal paste, (GELID Solutions GC-Extreme), and still average CPU temps right around 50 degrees centigrade. The hottest I've seen the CPU was when I was using mencoder to reencode a video file, and my machine hit 85 degrees centigrade. So I would be careful if you are going to run this laptop in warm environments.

2) Battery duration (12 cell) - I wouldn't know. I've never run it off AC.

3) Quality of the Sager support services - Can't comment (I purchased mine from another Clevo reseller)

4) Spare parts availability - Again no comment as I've not needed any.

5) Has anyone tested it with Linux? - Yes. It runs fine, and everything that I've tested works well.

6) Is the Raid controller supported under Linux? - The Clevo D900F doesn't come with a hardware RAID controller. It provides the Intel ICH Firmware RAID support, which is widely called "fakeraid", as many laptops do. That means that you can run the internal HD drives in RAID 0 or 1 arrays, with 2 drives installed, or, RAID 0, 1, or 5 arrays, with 3 drives installed. The caveat here is, if you intend to have the machine dual boot Windows and Linux, you need to configure the Linux installation with dmraid support, so that Linux will see the Windows RAID volumes correctly. I don't boot Windows on this system, so I installed the Linux kernel software RAID setup on 3 HD drives in a RAID 5 array, and everything works fine. I was planning on running Windows XP in a VM, ( Virtualbox), later, which wouldn't be affected by the underlying array configuration, but haven't got around to installing the VM yet.

7) Does eSata port works under Linux? - I don't know. I've not needed it, so I didn't build the kernel with a driver for it. I actually can't even see it with an lspci, so if someone who's got Vista installed can look and see what the manufacturer's information on the eSATA port is in Device Manager, (is it JMicron for example), I can try and see if I can load a driver for it.

8) Does really an external eSata device run like an internal disk? - I don't know, as I've not tried to use it.

Good Luck..

 

He is not going to be using this machine for gaming, so he may well have a use for 12GB RAM.

 

You really need to know if the hardware is supported by vmware if you are running the OS as a VM. Which version of vmware?

 

Running VM's with replicated databases requires some serious memory. I remember doing work in Personal Oracle years ago and consuming 8gb no problem.

 

Thank you all guys, Indeed 12 GB RAM seems to be a lot, but in my opinion, a good amount of GB when handling database tables around 1,000 million records... or having several databases (I mean Oracle, Sybase IQ, Teradata, etc...) running at the same time, for development purposes...
Good to know that someone is running Linux on it...

 

Regarding VMWare, I've been using VMWare Server 2, both Windows 32 and Linux 64 (Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope). Also used for some time VirtualBox on top of Opensolaris, but it lacks stability and support...

That's why I need to know if Raid 0 controller will be supported in Linux (my preferred distributions are Ubuntu 9.04, RedHat Enterprise and Suse Enterprise, mainly because the databases I use are supported in those distributions).

I choose Raid 0 since I just need big disks and performance (I generally do presentations on datawarehouse software and Olap solutions, besides doing development with client data. That's why I'm planning to buy eSata external 2 TB disk, to do regular night backups...

So my host OS will be Linux 64, most probable RedHat Enterprise or Suse Enterprise and as guests, some Windows 32 bit VM's (Win XP, Win 2000 Server and Win 2003 Server).

I do appreciate your help... I can not wait to put my hands on that "mobile enterprise server" as I have defined it (I hope I do not bother those respectable gamers around, but really, I do not enjoy PC games... probably my 14 years old son will enjoy it gaming in 3 years... hehe)

Michael

 

Right, actually I have 4 GB RAM, and need at least 8 when launching from the host OS, two or three Virtual Machines, 2 GB RAM each, to simulate a multi database server environment... and thus, having 4 OS running against the same disk, I decided to build a Raid 0 array to boost disk system performance...

So, having 8, why not go for the 12 GB one? Several times in the past I took the decission to wait only to see that in a timeframe of 1 or 2 years, there were no parts to upgrade

 

Throw enough memory at the databases and optimize it for caching and you won't have to worry too much about disk speed.

 

Something that has been on my mind recently is partition alignment for linux virtual machines. VMware has come out and said partition alignment for the system partition is not necessary but I'm guessing they are only saying that because people should worry more about the data partition performance. Since you plan on doing raid 0 will you pre-align the host system partition and the vm system partition for linux? if so what tool are you going to use? BTW, if you go the Windows 2008 route partition alignment is already taken care of by the OS.

Sorry if this is a little off topic but it does play into your disk performance statement.

 

My suggestion to you friend is doing RAID-5 if your data is important. That way if one hard drive fails, you can rebuild your data to a pretty healthy point. It will knock out your machine for a few hours while the parity rebuilds though, but it's better than complete loss of data. Or, if you want, if you're using the eSATA 2TB drive, make the original 1.5TB RAID-0 drive combine with the 2TB external in RAID-1 format. You'll lose 500GB of usable space off the external drive, but if you partition it properly, you can get that extra space as raw usable space, but it won't be in any form of RAID.

Also your RAID controller is a hardware-based controller, it *should* be supported no matter what OS you use. It should be able to run RAID before you even load on an OS! Actually it does, I can attest to this.

Also, I understand your need of 12GB of RAM. The longer you run machines, the more space they usually eat up. I have 6GB of RAM and if I have a great multitude of programs running and constantly doing new things, the total memory footprint they have becomes rather large. I've been on the desktop just using firefox and msn, with yahoo messenger, AIM, skype and things like Daemon Tools and HWMonitor running, and after a few days I checked my memory usage in Windows Task Manager and I was using over 4GB of RAM simply standing by. When I exited all of those programs it shot back down to using only 2.5, and after restarting them all I was using 2.8 or so. If you want to keep programs running often especially Virtual Machines, you're doing to need all the RAM you can get. I say get that 12GB friend!! Get it and have the machine that can keep going and going and going and going (Like the energizer bunny.... just smaller and with the ability to pwn desktops all around the world)

 

Absolutely agree... that's the idea

 

My first thought was Raid 5, but performance being important in a demo, I was interested in RAID 0. This won't be a production equipment, so I guess I can live with a regular night backup policy... It only worries me the amount of hours a 1.5 TB Raid 0 disk array will take to do full backups...Incremental Backups ***I guess*** are faster, but not as reliable as a full backups...

That would make it a RAID 10 (1+0 or 0+1) array. Being a very good idea, my back wouldn't stand it, since I need to move from customer to customer doing my living...I could not boot the machine without the eSata external drive...

Good to hear that...Thank you very much...

Again, good to hear that, I know is a rather expensive machine, but I will use it as an income generating machine... I bought my actual Dell Inspiron 1420, 4 GB RAM, 2.5 years ago, when it was the most powerfull business notebook you could get, at least 2x or 3x in price compared to regular notebooks, and it really paid off every cent...

Best regards

Michael

 

mmm... honestly, this is something I was not aware of... Let me do some investigation to come up with an answer... What i like from these forums, is that one can learn a lot from people like you ... just bewteen you and me, I'm an Economist that found that IT was much more fun...

 

@mikepre

You do not need the external drive to boot the machine, that's why it is in RAID-1. With RAID-1, you can boot with no problems at all if one of your hard drives has failed (or in this case, is disconnected). I would have to look into it if reconnecting the drive at a later time will simply re-write whatever information has changed, but I do not know about this for sure.

Also you can attempt a software RAID if you have a smart drive. What will happen is you select the parts of your system you want to be mirrored, and every night (or whatever schedule you plan to have it for) the drive will check your system for the locations you selected (you may probably just select your entire hard drive, so there's a copy of your machine as is on the drive, and there's no real hassle just leave it turned on when you go to sleep at night. My external drive supports this feature, though it is a USB drive and not an eSATA one, as the eSATA costed too much for too little space in my country.

As for RAID-5, you must remember that two of your hard drives will be in RAID-0. This means that READING from the drives and drive access time will benefit 100% from RAID-0. If you attempt to create and write files to your hard drive during demos with customers, then you will notice *slightly* slower write times than a plain old RAID-0. All RAID-5 does is copy the end result of files onto it. If one of the disks that are paired for performance happens to fail, it will use the 1/2 of the data left on the other hard drive and it's own "end result" data to "guess" what the second 1/2 of the data was on the failed drive. It will then rebuild the data to the new hard drive (or if you repaired your old one successfully) and you would regain most, if not all of the data you lost.

In short, if you only wish to load programs and show them in demos, use RAID-5 for security. If you need to create files and save/copy files to your own hard disk, then RAID-0 with some sort of other data security option will be great for you. Just remember that software RAID exists, in times when hardware RAID is not applicable or feasible, that is always an option.

 

D2, what you are describing is RAID 4. RAID 5 stripes the parity bits over all 3 (or more) drives thus resulting in an equal distribution of data + parity on all drives. This tends to help the write performance in relation to RAID 4.

 

I was recounting what I learned in class, if I'm really wrong then I apologise. I was told one drive holds the end bit data, and all other drives function as if in RAID-0, however if more than one drive fails, then you can get nothing back. Since this system only had 3 hard drives, I said one then the other two. Oh well. Either way it should still be as fast as RAID-0 in terms of reading data, should it not?

 

You can run raid 5 with 3 drives.. 2 in parity and the thrid as the mirror..

Striping 3 drives in a laptop with no mirror would be nerve racking for me.. as described by Mike.. he moves around a lot customer to customer..

I think on board raid 5 is the way to go? and considering the larger SSD's available.. you could run 2 SSD's in parity and dump to a 500gb 7,200rpm HDD.. if safety is a concern..

I am chicken little.. so forgive my projecting disaster recovery on any and all here..

Be well, JW

 

With all of the VM and the crashes that go with.. booting from a HDD to a sanitary wiped SSD(s) {Raid?} would be ideal.. I think..

Sorry I had to add that for some reason..

Be well, JW

 

Like I said, RAID 4 is 2 drives in RAID 0 with a third parity drive, RAID 5 increases write performance by striping the data & parity over all 3 drives, so you can still lose any one of the 3 drives without losing data, but losing 2 drives will cause the array to fail.

Look it up.

 

theriko's description of RAID 5 is correct. And as I stated in my post, the D900F does NOT have a hardware RAID controller. It's an Intel ICH10R chipset that provides, what the industry refers to as, Firmware RAID. The Wikipedia entry on this is accurate;

As the definition indicates, what this means is that all RAID calculations are done by the system CPU. Besides the initial boot, there is no RAID processing that's done in hardware. A more accurate thread discussion on this topic is actually posted at arstechnica here.

So for a Linux implementation, one can choose to install Linux Software RAID, if the system is only going to boot Linux, or Linux firmware RAID support via dmraid, if the system is going to be a dual boot Windows/Linux system. Most seem to agree that in terms of value, hardware RAID is number 1, software RAID is number 2, and firmware RAID is number 3. That's why the recommendation for building the system using Linux Software RAID. Additionally, Linux Software RAID can be implemented with ANY set of SATA HDDs installed in the D900F. If you install physical disks of different sizes, you are only able to stripe partitions of equal size, so it makes sense to use all the same size disks to begin with. If you use 2 disks, after you partition the disks, you can setup disk arrays of RAID 0, or RAID 1, "2 disks wide". Or you can mix RAID 0 and RAID 1 arrays across the same 2-disk set. If you use 3 disks, you can add RAID 5 arrays as well. For example in my D900f I have the following RAID arrays;

RAID 1 array - /dev/md1 ext2 filesystem mounted on /boot
/dev/sda1
/dev/sdb1
/dev/sdc1

RAID 1 array - /dev/md2 linux-swap filesystem mounted as the swap partition
/dev/sda2
/dev/sdb2
/dev/sdc2

RAID 1 array - /dev/md3 xfs filesystem to be mounted on /
/dev/sda3
/dev/sdb3
/dev/sdc3

RAID 5 array - /dev/md4 xfs filesystem to be mounted on /
/dev/sda4
/dev/sdb4
/dev/sdc4

The reason for the 2 different root arrays is because /dev/md3 is a small root array used for booting a different Linux kernel for diagnostics and testing of the system. The main "work" root partition is the much larger /dev/md4 array.

My file system alignment consisted of configuring the alignment for the /dev/md4 array only, since this is only an issue with RAID 0 or RAID 5 arrays. I first determined the stripe size and width, (using a guesstimate of what would be best for my use case), and then I aligned the xfs filesystem to that array configuration when I made the filesystem.

Good Luck..