Adaptec 2400A problems, tests & observations

[Simon L. Nielsen]

On 2003.07.17 17:05:23 -0700, Matt Staroscik wrote:
> 
> This is a crosspost of a thread I began on -questions. To summarize 
> previous posts: my Adaptec 2400A RAID card, with 2 Maxtor 160GB drives 
> (model 6Y160P0) in a RAID-1, corrupts data and produces kernel panics under 

I would say that a 2400A is overkill for a simple RAID1.

> heavy activity. This is under 4.8 (plain vanilla install), ECS L7VTA 
> motherboard (KT400), 512MB RAM, one vr NIC (on motherboard), 1 dc NIC 
> (PCI), 1 Matrox Millennium II PCI video card. The 2400A is supported by the 
> asr driver that is built into the GENERIC kernel.

This sounds very odd.  I have been running with my 2400A for a few
months now in a RAID5 configuration with 4 Western Digital 80GB discs
(special edition with 8MB cache) and it has worked very well.  I haven't
had any serious problems.

The only problem I had, was one time the mirror got degraded because the
RAID card said one disk had failed.  I don't know what happened, but
after a test of the disk with WDC's test program (which didn't reveal
any errors) and a RAID rebuild everything was fine again.

I'm running 5.1, but I ran 4.8 when I initially tested it and I haven't
experienced any data corruption with either FreeBSD version.

> (Those of you with 2400A's: what motherboard and hard drives are you using? 

I'm using an somewhat old Asus A7M (I think it's called that; it was
their first Slot A motherboard) with a 600Mhz Atlon.  As mentioned above
4 80GB WDC disks.

> Those of you with other ATA RAID cards: what's reliable and bootable?)

You can boot a RAID1 with the ata(4) software RAID, no need for a RAID
controller.  Only problem is that the rebuild might be a bit of a
challenge in 4.x since you have to hotswap the bad disk...

> - I have also done every imaginable type of cable swap and wiggle. I am as 
> sure as I can be that there are no gross hardware faults in this system.

Unless there is an error on the 2400A card...

-- 
Simon L. Nielsen
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