On Sun Feb 03, 2013 at 04:56:35 +0100, Christoph Nelles wrote:

Hi folks,

the dd_rescue to the new HDD took 14hours. It looks like ddrescue is not
reading and writing in parallel. In the end 8kb couldn't be read after
10 retries.

Note that there's a difference between dd_rescue and ddrescue. GNU
ddrescue seems to be the better option nowadays,

I just force-assembled the RAID with the new drive, but it failed almost
immediately with an WRITE FPDMA QUEUED error on one of the other drives
(sdj, formerly sdi). I tried immediately again, an this time one disk
was rejected but the RAID started on 8 devices, but xfs_repair failed
when one of the disks failed with an READ FPDMA QUEUED error :( and md
expelled the disk from the RAID.

It looks more like a controller problem as all the messages comming from
the drives on the PCIe Marvell have all the line
ataXX: illegal qc_active transition (00000002->00000003)
I found only one similar report about that problem:
http://marc.info/?l=linux-ide&m=131475722021117

Any recommendations for a decent and affordable SATA Controller with at
least 4 ports and faster than PCIe x1? Looks like there are only
Marvells and more expensive Enterprise RAID controllers.

I can recommend the Intel RS2WC080 (or any other LSI SAS2008 based
controller). Quite frankly, any SAS controller is almost certainly
going to be better than the SATA equivalent (and for not a huge amount
more), while still supporting standard SATA drives.

Cheers,
    Robin
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