ida problems, one disk broken = system very slow

[Matthew N. Dodd]

On Tue, 25 Oct 2005, Palle Girgensohn wrote:
> A customer has a machine with four disks in RAID 10 using the ida(8) 
> controller on FreeBSD-4.11.

ftp://ftp.jurai.net/users/winter/idacontrol.tar would solve a few of your 
problems on 5.x or better but getting it to work on 4.x requires patching 
and recompiling.

> Now one disk is broken. I have some questions:
>
> 1. How can I detect that a disk in a raid cluster is broken? It seems 
> natural to me that the raid driver would log info about a broken disk, 
> but I have not seen this happen with any raid controller driver.

Most array drivers have a userland utility that allows inspection of array 
status.  The utility for ida(4) isn't in the base system yet.

> 2. The system is extremely slow and hardly usable right now. The 
> customer are still waiting for a replacement disk. Is there any way to 
> get the system to just ignore the broken disk instead of trying to use 
> it and fail. I get thousands of "ida0: soft error" in messages log. If 
> the system would realize that it had problems with the disk, and ignore 
> them, perhaps it wouldn't become unsable,

Well, you could rate-limit the error messages, or comment out the message 
entirely.

> 3. Will the array rebuild automatically once they insert the new disk?

Depends on the BIOS setting.

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