Second new terminal (with Intel Atom) installed with SL 5.2. Looking good.

Write cache on RAID controller turned-off (danger of filesystem corruption under xfs).

Then, on a second thought, it was re-enabled (why do we have a 800VA UPS dedicated to the head node if we can't shutdown cleanly ?).

But what about individual disks' caches and xfs' 'metadata' ? Confusing.

On a third thought, better safe than sorry: write cache disabled.