adaptec 2120S report

[Scott Long]

Gary Stanley wrote:
> At 09:39 PM 9/17/2003, you wrote:
> 
>> After my failure to get the Serveraid-5i working, I have put in an 
>> Adaptec 2120S. This card has very similar features to the Serveraid 
>> card, with the addition that it actually works in FreeBSD.
>>
>> After a couple of days of testing I can recommend this card.  I have 
>> 6x36GB IBM 10krpm drives running in RAID 50 configuration with FreeBSD 
>> 5.1-REL.  The only downside was I cannot get it working at Ultra-320 
>> with this IBM x345 hotswap backplane, but it is working great at 
>> Ultra-160.
>>
>> With my configuration, a quick test of file system sequential access 
>> speed shows reads at 47mb/s and writes at 27mb/s.  The good news is, 
>> while the array is degraded and rebuilding, read is 10mb/s and write 
>> is 6mb/s which is still quite respectable. The box still feels fast 
>> enough while the array is rebuilding. The downside is rebuilding the 
>> RAID5 containers took 5 hours - each.
>>
>> Two problems with this controller in FreeBSD 5.1:
>>
>> 1. FreeBSD won't boot while the array is rebuilding. It hangs after 
>> detecting aacd0.  I did not try waiting 5 hours to see if it continued 
>> after the array rebuild finished.
>> Workaround is to only hot swap drives while FreeBSD is running, and do 
>> not reboot until rebuild is finished.  Alternatively, boot into the 
>> controller BIOS and wait for rebuild to finish there.
>>
>> 2. I could not get SMP kernel to work - its a Xeon 2.6ghz supporting 
>> hyperthreading. SMP worked without the controller, but hangs during 
>> boot with the controller.  Luckily this is not a big problem for us as 
>> we only need a single CPU and hyperthreading is of minor/dubious 
>> advantage.
>> Workaround is to simply not use an SMP kernel.
>>
>> Other than that, it seems to be working very nicely.  I look forward 
>> to seeing the Serveraid / ips driver issues resolved in 5.2...
>>
> 
> The issues you are having are something similar to what I experience. 
> When installing FreeBSD 4.x/5.2 onto a building array, the machine 
> panic's and then the background initialization restarts. (Building a 
> 500GB RAID5 array takes me 12 hours, lol)

I've having trouble reproducing this.  The most obvious question that
comes to mind is, which method of building the array are you using?
Creation via the 'Clear' method would likely cause the problems that you
are seeing.  Creation via the 'Quick Init' method might cause problems
too; I don't really trust it and haven't tested it much.

Scott