[NTLUG:Discuss] Software RAID woes

[Scott Ripley]

All,

Sorry I haven't gotten back with an update on this. I've been pretty
busy this week. I am now suspecting problems with the hpt366 driver. The
drives are detected at bootup, and work wonderfully in DMA66 mode. I get
sustained throughput of >17MB/sec. It is fast. Until.... I transfer from
one drive to the other. When I transfer from the disk on ide2 to the
disk on ide3, It goes blazingly fast for about 1/2 second, and then the
floor drops out. /dev/hde on ide2 drops back to PIO mode snail. I had
faster disk access in the '80s. If I transfer to/from the other ide
devices or the network it works just fine. Once I do a transfer from
ide2 to ide3, the only way to correct it is by restarting the system. At
least it lets me unmount my filesystems...

This could be closely related to accessing both disks set up as a
striped array. I am going to try to do more testing, so I can come up
with something more conclusive by this weekend. I want to see if the
same thing happens when I go from ide3 to ide2. hde to hdf, etc...

I have seen messages regarding a patch to prevent lockups for the 2.2.x
kernels in a situation similar to this, but it isn't locking. The two
things I saw specificaly mentioned in that email seem to be in the
2.3.40 kernel.

But... IANAKH(I Am Not A Kernel Hacker). So, before I go complaining to
anyone writing a driver, I suppose I will have to admit defeat (at least
temporarily), and try the 2.2.14 kernel with reccomended patches. The
hpt366 seems to be a very "innovative" way to do an ide controller, so I
expect to have problems until everything is ironed out. 

All in all, don't let this discourage anyone from getting an ABIT BP6 or
BE6 board with this controller. There are two perfectly good PIIX
controllers on the board that work right out of the box. This definately
tops the list as the best board I have ever owned. The price is right,
the features are extensive (with documentation), and the speed... whew.
I haven't burned a coaster yet with the CD-RW on ide1. 

And hey, I've learned alot so far.. Just not the right thing. :)

For now, I am giving up on making RAID0 work, and I'm concentrating on
getting the disks to work (in a more reliable manner) individually.
Thanks for the replies. I'll let you know what happens.

Scott
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