RE: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

RE: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Mitchell Laks]

Thank you to Gordon, Maarten and Guy for your helpful responses. I learned 
much from each of  your comments.

Maarten: I paid $70 for an antec sl450 power supply. seems better price than 
you are saying ( is your power supply better?). Also I liked the idea of 6 
+3+3 slots on your box, but i dont see it for sale in the us.

Gordon: I get the same output on 2.6.8 sarge kernel for hpt366 driver. I 
notice that running 
hdparm /dev/hde 
that the IO_support is set at default 16 bit while on the other hard drive 
on the natice ide bus 
/dev/hdb
has IO_support at 32bit. 
I wondered if I get the other driver whether that will improve things...

Guy: 

> echo 100000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max

>I added this to /etc/sysctl.conf
># RAID rebuild min/max speed K/Sec per device
>dev.raid.speed_limit_min = 1000
>dev.raid.speed_limit_max = 100000


I notice that according to the man page the settings you describe are the 
defaults. Why did you have to adjust them?
Moreover When I cat 
 /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max  -> i get ->200000
/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min  -> i get -> 1000.

interesting is i didnt adjust them up myself.... Should I adjust the 
speed+limit_max down to 100000???
I wonder where in debian it got adjusted up?
Thanks

Re: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Maarten]

On Sunday 16 January 2005 22:28, Mitchell Laks wrote:
> Thank you to Gordon, Maarten and Guy for your helpful responses. I learned
> much from each of  your comments.
>
> Maarten: I paid $70 for an antec sl450 power supply. seems better price
> than you are saying ( is your power supply better?). 

Heh.  At double that price, I would sure as hell hope so...!!  ;-)

If the Tagan is comparable to anything from Antec, it would be to the True480, 
not the SL450.  The Tagan is inaudible, if there were no case- and cpu fans 
whirring and mainboard-LEDs lit, you couldn't say if the unit was on or off. 
Add to that the fact that this psu has SO many connectors I could connect all 
10 harddrives without using a single splitter(!), that all connectors are 
gold plated, that it weighs more than the average complete case, and that it 
is very efficient...

But judge for yourself:
http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/tagan/tg480.htm

I really don't buy such extreme hardware usually.  But since I put the life of 
1.4TB raid-5 data (or 2 TB raw disk capacity) in its hands, it seemed like a 
good idea at the time.  Actually, it still does. :-)

Maarten

RE: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Mitchell Laks wrote:

> Thank you to Gordon, Maarten and Guy for your helpful responses. I learned
> much from each of  your comments.
>
> Gordon: I get the same output on 2.6.8 sarge kernel for hpt366 driver. I
> notice that running hdparm /dev/hde that the IO_support is set at
> default 16 bit while on the other hard drive on the natice ide bus
> /dev/hdb has IO_support at 32bit.  I wondered if I get the other driver
> whether that will improve things...

I get the same - 16-bit, however on that particular box, I also get 16-bit
for the on-board controller too (it is 6 years old though with a single
32-bit, 33MHz PCI bus!)

On other servers with a much more modern modo (dual Athlon systems) I see
32-bit for the on-board controller and 16-bit for the PCI Promise
controllers they have (I don't have anything else with a Highpoint card)

I'm not really up on PCI bus, etc. arcitecture, but I suspect the only
impact will be a doubling of the number of transactions going over the PCI
bus - probably not really an issue unless you have lots of PCI devices on
the same bus which all need to talk to each other, or to something
external (eg. Ethernet)

FWIW: I got a reply back from HighPoint about my question to run it under
2.6.10...

  Thanks for your contacting us!
  Our current OpenSource driver doesn't support kernel 2.6.10.

And that was all they had to say. Ho hum.


> I notice that according to the man page the settings you describe are the
> defaults. Why did you have to adjust them?
> Moreover When I cat
>  /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max  -> i get ->200000
> /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min  -> i get -> 1000.
>
> interesting is i didnt adjust them up myself.... Should I adjust the
> speed+limit_max down to 100000???
> I wonder where in debian it got adjusted up?

I don't think this is a distribution issue at all - certianly Debian
doesn't do anything with it at all and nothing appears to be inserted into
/etc/sysctl.conf

100000 seems to have been the default since at least 2.4.22 (the oldest
kernel I have running s/w RAID)

Gordon

Re: Spares and partitioning huge disks

[Mario Holbe]

maarten <maarten@ultratux.net> wrote:
> I just got my 4 new 250GB disks.  I have read someone on this list advocating 
> that it is better to build arrays with smaller volumes, as that decreases the 
> chance of failure, especially failures of two disks in a raid5 configuration. 

This might be true for read-errors.
However, if a whole disk dies (perhaps because the IDE controller fails,
I assume you're having IDE disks or because of a temperature failure or
something like that) with a couple of partitions on it, you get a lot of
simultaneously 'disks' (partitions), which would completely kill your
RAID5, because RAID5 can IMHO only recover one failing device.
I'd assume, such a setup would kill you in this case, while with only
4 devices (whole 250G disks) you'd survive it. I'm quite sure one
could get it managed back together with more or less expert knowledge,
but I belive the complete RAID would stop processing first.
Just to make this clear - all this are spontaneous assumptions, I did
never play with RAID5.



regards,
   Mario
-- 
I heard, if you play a NT-CD backwards, you get satanic messages...
That's nothing. If you play it forwards, it installs NT.

Re: Spares and partitioning huge disks

[Gordon Henderson]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, maarten wrote:

> P.S.:  I get this filling up my logs. Should I be worried about that ?
> Jan 10 11:30:32 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache buffer size, 512 --> 4096
> Jan 10 11:30:33 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache buffer size, 4096 --> 512
> Jan 10 11:30:33 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache buffer size, 512 --> 4096
> Jan 10 11:30:36 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache buffer size, 4096 --> 512

As I understand it, the "fix" is to comment it out in the kernel sources
and compile & install a new kernel...

It seems to be an artifact of LVM - then only times I've seen lots of
these are when I experimented with LVM... (incidentally I had some
instability with the occasional panic with LVM, so dumped it for that
particular application, and same hardware  & Kernel has been solid since)

Gordon

Re: Spares and partitioning huge disks

[maarten]

On Monday 10 January 2005 17:36, Gordon Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2005, maarten wrote:
> > P.S.:  I get this filling up my logs. Should I be worried about that ?
> > Jan 10 11:30:32 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache buffer size, 512 -->
> > 4096 Jan 10 11:30:33 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache buffer size,
> > 4096 --> 512 Jan 10 11:30:33 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache buffer
> > size, 512 --> 4096 Jan 10 11:30:36 dozer kernel: raid5: switching cache
> > buffer size, 4096 --> 512
>
> As I understand it, the "fix" is to comment it out in the kernel sources
> and compile & install a new kernel...

Ehm...?

> It seems to be an artifact of LVM - then only times I've seen lots of
> these are when I experimented with LVM... (incidentally I had some
> instability with the occasional panic with LVM, so dumped it for that
> particular application, and same hardware  & Kernel has been solid since)

I'm certain I saw it before, when I didn't use LVM at all.  Maybe the kernel 
scans for LVM at boot, but LVM was not in initrd for sure.

But is it dangerous or detrimental to performance (other than that it logs way 
too much) ?

Maarten

4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Mitchell Laks]

HI,
I have 3 questions. 

1) Maarten, Where did you buy the big chieftec chasis (CA-01B  i think) and 
what did you pay for it?  I have been using antec sx1000 chasis and yours 
looks better and bigger. 

2) Also what are reasonable resync times for your big raid5 arrays?
I had resync time or two days by accident recently for 4x 250 hard drives 
because i did not have dma enabled. that is solved, but i had switched to 
raid1 in the interm and now i am curious what others are used to.

3) Also, i have a module driver question.
I use a asus K8V-X motherboard. It has sata and parallel ide channels. I use 
the sata for my system and use the  parallel for data storage on ide raid.
I am using  combining the 2 motherboard IDE cable channels with highpoint 
rocket133 cards to provide 2 more ide ata channels. 

I installed debian and it defaulted to using the hpt366 modules for the 
rocket133 controllers. 
I suspect (correct me if I am wrong) that the hpt302 on the highpoint website 
is the RIGHT module to use (I notice for instance that when I compare the 
hdparm settings on the western digital drives on the motherboard ide channels 
are set with more advanced dma settings "turned on" than   on the rocket133 
controllers. Perhaps this is because it is using the 'incorrect hpt366' 
module? 
 
Of course I would prefer to use the hpt302 module  (after i compile it...). So 
how do I get to insure that the system will use the hpt302 over the hpt366 
that it seems to be chosing. If I 
1) compile the module hpt302 from source 
2) dump it in the /lib/modules/2.6.9-1-386/kernel/drivers/ide/pci directory
3) put a line hpt302 in the /etc/modules file (maybe at the top?)
4) put a line hpt302 at  the top of the file /etc/mkinitd/modules.
5) run mkinitrd to generate the new initrd.img

will this insure that the module hpt302 is loaded on preference to the hpt366 
module?

4) Maarten mentioned that he had a problem with 2 different drives on the same 
channel for raid5. What was the problem exactly with that.

Re: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005, Mitchell Laks wrote:

> 3) Also, i have a module driver question.
> I use a asus K8V-X motherboard. It has sata and parallel ide channels. I use
> the sata for my system and use the  parallel for data storage on ide raid.
> I am using  combining the 2 motherboard IDE cable channels with highpoint
> rocket133 cards to provide 2 more ide ata channels.
>
> I installed debian and it defaulted to using the hpt366 modules for the
> rocket133 controllers.

I've just been down this road myself... Debian Woody, kernels 2.4 and 2.6
and a Highpoint rocket133 controller...

> I suspect (correct me if I am wrong) that the hpt302 on the highpoint website
> is the RIGHT module to use (I notice for instance that when I compare the
> hdparm settings on the western digital drives on the motherboard ide channels
> are set with more advanced dma settings "turned on" than   on the rocket133
> controllers. Perhaps this is because it is using the 'incorrect hpt366'
> module?

Using the module off their web site worked for me with kernel 2.4.28 - but
it turned my IDE drives into SCSI drives! No real issue, but the smart
drive termperature program stopped working...

The driver wouldn't compile with 2.6.10, but the hpt366 driver did work
under 2.6.10 and seems to work very well - and the drives still look like
IDE drives and hddtemp still works.

> Of course I would prefer to use the hpt302 module (after i compile
> it...). So

Would you? The 366 driver in 2.6.10 recognises that it's a 302 card and
seems to work well... dmesg output:

HPT302: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:0a.0
HPT302: chipset revision 1
HPT37X: using 33MHz PCI clock
HPT302: 100% native mode on irq 18
    ide2: BM-DMA at 0x9800-0x9807, BIOS settings: hde:DMA, hdf:pio
    ide3: BM-DMA at 0x9808-0x980f, BIOS settings: hdg:DMA, hdh:pio
Probing IDE interface ide2...
hde: Maxtor 6Y080L0, ATA DISK drive
ide2 at 0xb000-0xb007,0xa802 on irq 18
Probing IDE interface ide3...
hdg: Maxtor 6Y080L0, ATA DISK drive
ide3 at 0xa400-0xa407,0xa002 on irq 18

I have it compiled into the kernel here too - not a module. (personal
choice, I never have modules unless I can avoid it)


> how do I get to insure that the system will use the hpt302 over the hpt366
> that it seems to be chosing. If I
> 1) compile the module hpt302 from source
> 2) dump it in the /lib/modules/2.6.9-1-386/kernel/drivers/ide/pci directory
> 3) put a line hpt302 in the /etc/modules file (maybe at the top?)
> 4) put a line hpt302 at  the top of the file /etc/mkinitd/modules.
> 5) run mkinitrd to generate the new initrd.img

The easiest way would be to compile a custom kernel yourself. Just leave
out the Highpoint drivers and then compile and load the hpt302 module at
boot time by listing it in the /etc/modules file.

> 4) Maarten mentioned that he had a problem with 2 different drives on
> the same channel for raid5. What was the problem exactly with that.

It's possible that a failing IDE drive will crowbar the bus and take out
the other drive with it - not neccessarily damage any data on the drive,
but prevent it being seen by the OS. I've experienced this myself. In a
RIAD-5 situation, you'd lose 2 drives which would not be a good thing..

Gordon

Re: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Maarten]

On Sunday 16 January 2005 17:19, Mitchell Laks wrote:
> HI,
> I have 3 questions.
>
> 1) Maarten, Where did you buy the big chieftec chasis (CA-01B  i think) and
> what did you pay for it?  I have been using antec sx1000 chasis and yours
> looks better and bigger.

I paid 120 euro I think. The BA-01B is a bit cheaper but exactly the same 
except for the missing side window. I bought it at some local shop in the 
netherlands. However I went and bought a more powerful and ultrasilent Tagan 
480 W PSU to replace the 360W chieftec one. That Tagan PSU was more expensive 
than the chieftec case+psu together.
The case pleases me, but in all fairness the Antec cases are better in respect 
to details, this case has some mild sharp edges which I did not ever find 
with Antec.  But that is a minor detail( to me). Of course it's not as bad as 
with noname cheap case brands.  Overall I thought this case deserved a 5/5 
for design, a 5/5 for ingenuity, and a 4/5 for craftsmanship.
(Incidentally the Tagan PSU deserves a full 5/5 too)

The shop will ship in Holland, but not abroad AFAIK. And that would be 
cost-prohibitive anyway, this case is really a big sucker.

> 2) Also what are reasonable resync times for your big raid5 arrays?
> I had resync time or two days by accident recently for 4x 250 hard drives
> because i did not have dma enabled. that is solved, but i had switched to
> raid1 in the interm and now i am curious what others are used to.

Not sure. At first I built the array on a lowly old celeron-500 and the resync 
time of each of the 6 arrays was IIRC 50 minutes, so about 5 hours all told.
With the new case I also installed a much faster board, an athlon 1400, so 
resync now is at (about) 20 minutes for each array, but I admit I did not 
take notes there.

The other big array, consisting of whole-drive 160GB disks (5-1)x160GB=640GB 
did a resync in a little over 2 hours I think. Less than three, at any rate.

> 3) Also, i have a module driver question.
> I use a asus K8V-X motherboard. It has sata and parallel ide channels. I
> use the sata for my system and use the  parallel for data storage on ide
> raid. I am using  combining the 2 motherboard IDE cable channels with
> highpoint rocket133 cards to provide 2 more ide ata channels.

I myself now have in use:
The VIA onboard ATA channels
One Promise SATA TX2 150
Two noname SIL / silicon image SATA controllers
One Promise ATA Tx133

The onboard VIA SATA controller is left unused. I may use it later but it gave 
me some problems in the past so I went for the simplest solution now.

> I installed debian and it defaulted to using the hpt366 modules for the
> rocket133 controllers.
> I suspect (correct me if I am wrong) that the hpt302 on the highpoint
> website is the RIGHT module to use (I notice for instance that when I
> compare the hdparm settings on the western digital drives on the
> motherboard ide channels are set with more advanced dma settings "turned
> on" than   on the rocket133 controllers. Perhaps this is because it is
> using the 'incorrect hpt366' module?

I once had a mainboard with HPT cntr onboard, an older version though (266?). 
Since then I carefully avoided highpoint as well as I could... I will not buy 
one unless held at gunpoint. Same as with Sony, I hate that brand.

> Of course I would prefer to use the hpt302 module  (after i compile it...).
> So how do I get to insure that the system will use the hpt302 over the
> hpt366 that it seems to be chosing. If I
> 1) compile the module hpt302 from source
> 2) dump it in the /lib/modules/2.6.9-1-386/kernel/drivers/ide/pci directory
> 3) put a line hpt302 in the /etc/modules file (maybe at the top?)
> 4) put a line hpt302 at  the top of the file /etc/mkinitd/modules.
> 5) run mkinitrd to generate the new initrd.img
>
> will this insure that the module hpt302 is loaded on preference to the
> hpt366 module?

Sorry, I've no clue on that. Your story sounds reasonable, but why not start 
by getting the module compiled ?  Most times, that is the hard part.  If that 
succeeds and you can insmod it without probs, there is plenty of time to 
convince the kernel to load the right module I think. 

> 4) Maarten mentioned that he had a problem with 2 different drives on the
> same channel for raid5. What was the problem exactly with that.

The same problem everyone has.  If an IDE drive fails, it does not -as SCSI 
drives tend to do- leave the electrical IDE bus in a free/useable state.  So 
the other drive on that cable is still "good", but unreachable/dead for now.  
This obviously leads to a fatal 2-drive failure.  It doesn't matter the 
second drive's failure is only temporary; the md / ide code doesn't know 
that.
You can often restore the array manually, but this is not something that is 
done lightly, so really better to be avoided...  

Maarten

RE: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Guy]

If your rebuild seems too slow, make sure you increase the speed limit!
Details in "man md".

echo 100000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max

I added this to /etc/sysctl.conf
# RAID rebuild min/max speed K/Sec per device
dev.raid.speed_limit_min = 1000
dev.raid.speed_limit_max = 100000

Guy

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org
[mailto:linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Mitchell Laks
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 11:20 AM
To: maarten
Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Subject: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting
ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

HI,
I have 3 questions. 

1) Maarten, Where did you buy the big chieftec chasis (CA-01B  i think) and 
what did you pay for it?  I have been using antec sx1000 chasis and yours 
looks better and bigger. 

2) Also what are reasonable resync times for your big raid5 arrays?
I had resync time or two days by accident recently for 4x 250 hard drives 
because i did not have dma enabled. that is solved, but i had switched to 
raid1 in the interm and now i am curious what others are used to.

3) Also, i have a module driver question.
I use a asus K8V-X motherboard. It has sata and parallel ide channels. I use

the sata for my system and use the  parallel for data storage on ide raid.
I am using  combining the 2 motherboard IDE cable channels with highpoint 
rocket133 cards to provide 2 more ide ata channels. 

I installed debian and it defaulted to using the hpt366 modules for the 
rocket133 controllers. 
I suspect (correct me if I am wrong) that the hpt302 on the highpoint
website 
is the RIGHT module to use (I notice for instance that when I compare the 
hdparm settings on the western digital drives on the motherboard ide
channels 
are set with more advanced dma settings "turned on" than   on the rocket133 
controllers. Perhaps this is because it is using the 'incorrect hpt366' 
module? 
 
Of course I would prefer to use the hpt302 module  (after i compile it...).
So 
how do I get to insure that the system will use the hpt302 over the hpt366 
that it seems to be chosing. If I 
1) compile the module hpt302 from source 
2) dump it in the /lib/modules/2.6.9-1-386/kernel/drivers/ide/pci directory
3) put a line hpt302 in the /etc/modules file (maybe at the top?)
4) put a line hpt302 at  the top of the file /etc/mkinitd/modules.
5) run mkinitrd to generate the new initrd.img

will this insure that the module hpt302 is loaded on preference to the
hpt366 
module?

4) Maarten mentioned that he had a problem with 2 different drives on the
same 
channel for raid5. What was the problem exactly with that.
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Re: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Maarten]

On Sunday 16 January 2005 20:39, Guy wrote:
> If your rebuild seems too slow, make sure you increase the speed limit!
> Details in "man md".
>
> echo 100000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max

Hi Guy,
You always say that, but that never helps me (since my distro already has 
100000 as default).  Are there even distros that have this set too low ? 

Maarten

RE: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times, selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

[Guy]

Yes, RedHat 9 defaults to much less, 10,000 I think.

I assumed it was the md default.  Maybe a RedHat 9 issue.

I just looked at the man page for md.  It says "The default is 100,000.".  I
did upgrade to Kernel 2.4.28 a few weeks ago.  I guess the default was
changed in a newer version of md.

My /etc/sysctl.conf has a date of Dec 12, 2003.  So, whatever kernel I had
over 1 year ago had a default of 10,000, or so.

Anyway, it has helped some people in the past. :)
I guess it depends on the kernel/md version.

I guess a default of no limit would be nice.  But no support for that, yet!

Guy

-----Original Message-----
From: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org
[mailto:linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Maarten
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 3:56 PM
To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: 4 questions. Chieftec chassis case CA-01B, resync times,
selecting ide driver module loading, raid5 :2 drives on same ide channel

On Sunday 16 January 2005 20:39, Guy wrote:
> If your rebuild seems too slow, make sure you increase the speed limit!
> Details in "man md".
>
> echo 100000 > /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max

Hi Guy,
You always say that, but that never helps me (since my distro already has 
100000 as default).  Are there even distros that have this set too low ? 

Maarten


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