Upgrades
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Like every other Maxtor I’ve deployed in the last several years, the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) 120 GB drive in this server was throwing multiple read errors and threatening to fail at any moment.
As opposed to waiting for its imminent death, I decided it was time to do some upgrades.
Not wanting to invest in a PATA drive in 2008, I added a Promise SATA300 TX2 SATA PCI controller card and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 750GB (ST3750330AS)
No hardware upgrade is ever complete without the complementing software upgrade. During the procedure I also opted to upgrade the system from FreeBSD 6.2 to the nearly production ready FreeBSD 7.0 RC2.
In spite of the long hours of work required to completely setup a new FreeBSD installation, everything went smooth. FreeBSD plays nice with the new controller card and everything is now up and running and back to normal. The old 120 GB drive was getting a little cramped anyway, the extra breathing room is going to be nice!
