Man I wish I always got reports like this one!
Thanks :).
might be a SATA only issue. I do not have a SATA board handy so I might have
to call on the community to lend/give me one of these beasts.
I think this is a pretty desirable config for a lot of folks that cannot
afford SCSI / need more storage space than SCSI drives can offer. I'm
really short on cash right now - is anyone out there willing to split
the cost of one of these cards with me (to give to Marco)?
The hardware I'm using:
* SATA drives
* Supermicro CSE-M35T SATA hot swap enclosure (142CDN / 129USD)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817121405
http://www.ncix.com/search/?q=cse-m35t&SUB=Search&mm=1&mp1=&mp2=&m=0&p=1&s=1&a=0
* A motherboard with a PCI-X slot
* MegaRAID SATA 300-8X controller (537CDN)
http://www.ncix.com/search/?quicksearch=300-8x&minprice=Min.+Price&maxprice=Max.+Price
Matthew
On Mon, 16 Oct 2006, Marco Peereboom wrote:
Man I wish I always got reports like this one!
In my previous testing I have not been able to recreate this issue. I will try
this soonish on my equipment. I do have some circumstantial evidence that this
might be a SATA only issue. I do not have a SATA board handy so I might have
to call on the community to lend/give me one of these beasts.
Stay tuned, this is on my radar.
On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 02:05:39PM -0600, Matthew Mulrooney wrote:
Summary
-------
Alright, I've upgraded the firmware on this card to the most recent
release (814D from 2006.06.26), and re-run the tests *without* success.
If you have this card, you should avoiding using bioctl to set unused
drives to hotspares at this time.
Specifics
---------
Bad news:
* I've re-run my test sequence *without* success after having upgraded
the firmware to 814D.
* The LSI boot menu still has no option to reset a drive to "Unused"
from "Hot spare"
Good news:
* There is an option in LSI WebBIOS boot menu, to reset a drive to
"Unusued". [This may have been there before - I never tried the
WebBIOS boot menu.]
Bad news:
* I managed to corrupt my array while playing with the bioctl hot-spared
drive in the WebBIOS. [Both the normal boot menu, and the WebBIOS
boot menu think everything is good, but OpenBSD fails to boot with the
following output:
Using drive 0, partition 3.
Loading...
ERR M
] This may have been my fault, but I'm out of time to keep rebuilding
and retesting.
Other
-----
I'm going to push this box into production shortly. None of this stuff
is show stopping (I can live with the occasional after-hours reboot now
that I understand the behaviour). I should also note that bioctl from
this snapshot very conveniently displays the percentage complete of an
array that is rebuilding. :)
If anyone would like me to run some tests before I push this into
production, please contact me soon...
Matthew
Problem summary (problems with bioctl -H on a SATA 300-8x)
===============
To summarize (I've included the full test case below) - I can now use
bioctl -H to set an "Unused" drive to "Hot spare". However, despite
showing as hot spare in *both* bioctl and the LSI boot menu, when I
fail a drive in my RAID array, the "hot spare" fails to behave as such
(it will not be integrated into the degraded RAID array).
It gets worse - once a drive has been set as a hot spare through
bioctl,
it can never be changed back to unused, nor can it be properly set as
a
hotspare through the LSI boot menu. Essentially that slot is now
unusable. The only solution that I have found is to "Clear
configuration" from the LSI boot menu (which then requires reinstall
of
the contents of the drives).
