Re: potentially lost largeish raid5 array..

On Fri, 2011-09-23 at 07:56 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:

On 9/23/2011 12:10 AM, Thomas Fjellstrom wrote:

quoted

I /really really/ wish the driver for this card was more stable, but you deal
with what you've got (in my case a $100 2 port SAS/8 port SATA card).

Please don't shield the identity of the problem card.  Others need to 
know of your problems.  An educated guess tells me it is one of...

Card:    SuperMicro AOC-SASLP-MV8            Marvell 88SE6480
Driver:  MVSAS

Card:    HighPoint RocketRAID 2680/2680SGL   Marvell 88SE6485
Driver:  MVSAS

This ASIC/driver combo is so historically horrible with Linux that I'm 
surprised all the owners haven't had a big bon fire party and thrown all 
the cards in.  Or simply Ebay'd them to Windows users, where they seem 
to work relatively OK.

Solve your problem with a 50% more $$ LSI SAS1068E based Intel 8 port 
PCIe x4 SAS/SATA HBA, which uses the mptsas driver:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117157

It seems this is the card most users switch to after being burned by the 
cheap Marvell based SAS 2xSFF8087 cards.  The 1068E cards and the mptsas 
driver are far more reliable, stable, and faster.  Many OEM cards from 
IBM, Dell, etc, use this chip and can be had on Ebay for less than the 
new retail Intel card.  In your situation I'd probably buy new Intel 
just in case.  Hope this info/insight helps.

Keep in mind that the 1068E based cards do NOT support 3T drives fully.

K