Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2006 14:26:57 -0400 From: "Tamouh H." <hakmi@rogers.com> To: <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: ICH5R, ICH7R or Promise PDC20378 RAID? Message-ID: <20060620182659.2293343D55@mx1.FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <6C0CF58A187DA5479245E0830AF84F4218CCFC@poweredge.attiksystem.ch>
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=20 > 1) With the Promise controller, after simulating a disk=20 > problem (shutdown - disk disconnection - reboot - shutdown -=20 > disk reconnection - reboot), I wasn't able to rebuild the=20 > array at all, either with "atacontrol rebuild ar0" or from=20 > the bios. I suspect a spare disk is necessary for a complete rebuild. >=20 > 2) With the ICH5R controller, installation went fine too. If=20 > I disconnect a disk, the system still boots, but when I plug=20 > the disk back (computer shut down), no boot is possible=20 > anymore. At boot, a kernel panic says:=20 > "softdep_setup_inomapdep". No array rebuild is possible from=20 > the bios, so I'm stuck. >=20 >=20 > I use freebsd 6.1 RELEASE, with the latest BIOS for the=20 > motherboard, and > 2 SATA 1.0 Western Digital 160GB disks. I'm trying to=20 > configure RAID 1. >=20 > I'm surprised I have so many problems. Am I doing anything=20 > wrong? With INTEL hardware controllers for SCSI disks, I=20 > never had any problems until now. Does anyone successfully=20 > use another ASUS board, and is able to rebuild the array,=20 > without rebooting? >=20 Few things I noticed about the on-board Promise chipset on ASUS that it = is very poorly designed. If you do the unplug/replug test, it most = likely won't work, you need to use a spare drive or re-format the drive = and then replug it. It also goes out of sync very often, so you want to make sure you're = running consistency checks at least once a month. Sometimes when one of the RAID-1 drives develops bad sectors, the whole = array won't boot until you unplug one of the drives, and plug a spare = one. My conclusion, if you need something stable, don't use the onboard raid, = get a RAID card even the cheap ones will do better job!! Tamouh
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