RE: what is the best multi-SATA-controller-on-a-single-board out there?

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org 
[mailto:linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Jon Lewis
Sent: 02 August 2004 21:10
To: Tim Small
Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: what is the best 
multi-SATA-controller-on-a-single-board out there?

On Mon, 2 Aug 2004, Tim Small wrote:

quoted

The Promise cards, are cheap, but only do 66Mhz/32 bit PCI 

and provide 

quoted

four SATA ports, so they may not be well suited to some 

boards..  Both 

quoted

chipsets were used with libata on 2.6 kernels, with a 

mixture of s/w 

quoted

raid5, and s/w raid1.  The only slight irritation is the 

current lack 

quoted

of smartd support (pending libata driver support).

With what distros / exactly which kernels?  I've been testing 
a system with 2 Promise SATA150 TX4's and 6 Maxtor 200gb SATA 
drives in a supermicro (mb/chassis) system with 7 drive 
hot-swap drive carrier.  I've been having serious problems 
and am having trouble telling if its hardware or software.  
I've been trying both Whitebox (basically RH ES 3.0 which 
uses a 2.4 kernel and includes libata but doesn't build it by 
default) and Fedora Core 2, which supports the SATA hardware 
by default.  OS gets installed on smaller drives on the MB's 
PATA controller.  The big 6 drives are supposed to be SW 
RAID5.  The system usually locks up while building the array. 
 Today it got as far as nearly finishing the mke2fs on the 
array when it locked up.

Running badblocks on each 200gb drive individually, I got 
errors on one of them once.  When I reran badblocks on that 
drive, I did not get errors.
I still can't get an array built/formatted (under whitebox 
today) without the system locking up.

So, I'm curious who else is using the SATA150 TX4 and with 
which kernel/driver and whether they're having or have seen 
any similar problems.

Jon,

I've got a very similar setup to you - 2 x SATA150 TX4 with 6 x Maxtor 250GB
drives.

I had exactly the same symptoms and I found it was caused by failing drives.
I think I got a bad batch, or a bad supplier or something because I had
three out of a batch of four fail. I got replacements from Maxtor (3 year
warranty) and have not had any problems since.

When you RMA their drives they ask that you download a utility called
"powermax" and check out the drives before returning them - the utility
gives you a failure code if the drive is bad. Try downloading it and running
the quick test on your drives. I'll give you 5-1 that they will fail.

R.
--
http://robinbowes.com