Re: Dell perc card corrupted by FreeBSD driver?

On Thu, Mar 21, 2024 at 8:16 AM Dan Mahoney (Ports) <freebsd@gushi.org> wrote:
> We have a Dell Perc h330 mini that we’ve been using with the older “mfi” driver, not the newer mrsas.  Recently, it started giving us an error on boot claiming that it was "Disabling writes to flash as the flash part has gone bad"

Hey Dan, I have no such hardware but something may wear-out-flash
memory as each flash has limited thousands of write cycles.. or they
got faulty Flash chips batch. It would be good to know what flash type
is used NOR or NAND? For sure they had such situation in mind creating
bios that will print that message on boot after failed write so we can
assume Flash memory is written at least once per boot ;-)

Assuming that problem is caused by flash-wear-out and really is BSD
related it may be kernel driver or startup application (mfiutil?). But
it also may be faulty controller firmware or bios storing something
too frequently in that flash.

If you can pull out the controller, there might be some sort of small
8-pin serial (NOR) Flash memory chip onboard, that it is easy and
cheap to replace. You can also use memory programmer to dump it
contents and verify if really write fails. If the memory is a bigger
chip (NAND Flash) then it may have badblocks by design and the
question is what filesystem is used to store data on that particular
flash memory type and if this is flash friendly fs and how
firmware/bios handles errors :-)

--
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info