From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jul 5 23:56:15 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 03AFD16A4E0 for ; Wed, 5 Jul 2006 23:56:15 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jeremye@caltech.edu) Received: from outgoing-mail.its.caltech.edu (outgoing-mail.its.caltech.edu [131.215.239.19]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AF7D543D45 for ; Wed, 5 Jul 2006 23:56:14 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from jeremye@caltech.edu) Received: from earth-dog.caltech.edu (earth-dog [192.168.1.3]) by earth-ox-postvirus (Postfix) with ESMTP id 32A8B109CA1 for ; Wed, 5 Jul 2006 16:56:09 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [10.1.236.238] (mystic.caltech.edu [131.215.220.112]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by fire-ox.its.caltech.edu (Postfix) with ESMTP id A305B33EA8 for ; Wed, 5 Jul 2006 16:56:03 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <44AC5190.9070001@caltech.edu> Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 16:56:00 -0700 From: Jeremy Ehrhardt User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.2 (Windows/20050317) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Scanned: at Caltech-ITS on earth-dog by amavisd-2.3.3 Subject: vinum stability? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 23:56:15 -0000 I have a quad-core Opteron nForce4 box running 6.1-RELEASE/amd64 with a gvinum RAID 5 setup comprising six identical SATA drives on three controllers (the onboard nForce4 SATA, which is apparently two devices, and one Promise FastTrak TX2300 PCI SATA RAID controller in IDE mode), combined into one volume named "drugs". We've been testing this box as a file server, and it usually works fine, but smartd reported a few bad sectors on one of the drives, then a few days later it crashed while I was running chmod -R on a directory on "drugs" and had to be manually rebooted. I can't figure out exactly what happened, especially given that RAID 5 is supposed to be robust against single drive failures and that despite the bad blocks smartctl claims the drive is healthy. I have three questions: 1: what's up with gvinum RAID 5? Does it crash randomly? Is it considered stable? Will it lose data? 2: am I using a SATA controller that has serious problems or something like that? In other words, is this actually gvinum's fault? 3: would I be better off using a different RAID 5 system on another OS? Jeremy Ehrhardt jeremye@caltech.edu