major pita w/LSI Tyan TA26 combo

[Freddie Cash]

On Friday 03 March 2006 12:38 pm, Ken Gunderson wrote:
> Been there and done that w/this before but I'm exasperated and don't
> know where to go from here.

> Anyways, system details:
> FreeBSD 5.4 and 6.0
> Tyan TA26 <http://www.tyan.com/products/html/ta26b2882.html>
> 2 x Opteron 252
> 4 x 1GB DDR400 ECC Registered Ram
> LSI 320-2x and LSI 320-1
> Fujitsu U320 SCSI drives, both 10K and 15K rpm

> Problem:
> Create an array, subject it to some moderate I/O and the logical drive
> becomes "degraded" w/a "failed" drive.  The logical drive cannot be
> rebuilt.  The physical drive is in fact fine, e.g. can format and
> consistency check. Same problem if swap in a different drive, etc.,
> e.g.:

Would this controller happen to be plugged into a riser card?  Or is it 
plugged directly into the motherboard?

We just returned a whole mess of LSI MegaRAID boards with similar issues 
(lose a drive on a regular basis, I/O drops down into the KB/s range, CPU 
spends 75%+ time in iowait state, controller not properly identified 
during install preventing any OS from being installed).  On Tyan Thunder 
K8SD-Pro (S2882) motherboards.

The 2U rackmount systems that used an approved Tyan riser card for the 
PCI-X slot had all the problems.  The tower systerms that plugged the 
RAID controller directly into the PCI-X slot onthe motherboard have been 
working for months without issues.

We tested FreeBSD 6.0, 6.1-beta1, and 6.1-beta2, Debian Linux stable 
(2.6.8 and 2.6.15 kernels), testing (2.6.11, 2.6.12, 2.6.13, 2.6.14 
kernels), and unstable (2.6.14 and 2.6.15 kernels).  With the included 
megaraid drivers and the custom drivers direct from LSI.

The official word from LSI Support is:  they do not support any RAID 
controllers connected to riser cards, no matter what the OS.  Go that via 
e-mail from one of their support techs and one of their RAID engineers.

> Does anybody have ideas and/or receommend anything that actually
> works?!?!

Switch to 3Ware and/or Areca cards.  :)  We replaced all the LSI MegaRAID 
cards in the 2U rackmounts with 3Ware Escalade 9550SX cards and have been 
chugging along nicely ever since (FreeBSD 6.1-beta2 i386 and amd64, and 
Debian Linux stable custom install with 2.6.15 kernel 64-bit).  Besides, 
the management tools from LSI are pure crud compared to 3DM2.

-- 
Freddie Cash
fcash at ocis.net