From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Maarten Subject: Re: Raid6 array crashed-- 4-disk failure...(?) Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:14:57 +0200 Message-ID: <48CE9811.60307@ultratux.net> References: <48CE250C.8000603@ultratux.net> <20080915125951.GA17966@skl-net.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20080915125951.GA17966@skl-net.de> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Andre Noll Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Andre Noll wrote: > On 11:04, Maarten wrote: >> This weekend I promoted my new 6-disk raid6 array to production use and >> was busy copying data to it overnight. The next morning the machine had >> crashed, and the array is down with an (apparent?) 4-disk failure, as >> witnessed by this info: > > Believe it or not: The same thing (6-disk raid6, 4 disks failed) > happened also to me during this weekend. Hehe. It doesn't get more scary than this.... ;-) >> 4) If it was only a one-drive failure, why did it kill the array ? > > As others have already pointed out, this was not a one-drive > failure. In my case, the two SATA disks which are still functional > are connected to a 3ware controller while the four failed disks use > the onboard SATA controller [1]. Therefore I'm confident that this > is just a problem with the onboard SATA chip and that the array can > be assembled again after a reboot. I'll have to wait until the end > of the week to reboot that machine though. > > Are you also using an Intel-based SATA chip (please send the output > of lspci -v)? Also, which kernel version are you using? No, my chipset is a VIA one. Because the VIA SATA chips/drivers are terrible, I use only SATA PCI cards with Sil chipsets. Believe it or not I have good/excellent experiences with these. The driver is quite stable, better than everything else I tried. apoc log # lspci 00:00.0 Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8377 [KT400/KT600 AGP] Host Bridge (rev 80) 00:01.0 PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 PCI Bridge 00:07.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02) 00:08.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02) 00:09.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3114 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA Controller (rev 02) 00:0a.0 RAID bus controller: Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3124 PCI-X Serial ATA Controller (rev 02) 00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL-8169 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10) 00:0f.0 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06) 00:11.0 ISA bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8237 ISA bridge [KT600/K8T800/K8T890 South] 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Rage XL AGP 2X (rev 65) Linux apoc 2.6.23-gentoo-r3 #2 Fri Apr 25 11:09:37 CEST 2008 i686 AMD Sempron(tm) 2200+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux >> 5) Any insight as to how this happened / can be prevented in future ? > > Don't use cheap hardware (Fast, cheap, good. Pick two) ;) How true. In this case I think(or hope) I went for "cheap, good"... Sixteen disks on 4 PCI slots (but still a single PCI bus!) is far from fast indeed. ;-) I get a rebuild speed of 20436K/sec on a 5-disk raid5 array (SATA 250 GB disks), which is not terrible, but not fast either. I'm considering a 8/12/16 port Areca controller but a few practicalities hold me back: the price, and the fact I would need a PCI-X slot unless I want to kill performance by a factor of 10. Also, the fact that I then cannot use software raid anymore tends to scare me a little: You never know how firmware reacts in the more 'interesting' circumstances, and you lose control over it... Maarten > Andre > > [1] 00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 631xESB/632xESB SATA > Storage Controller AHCI (rev 09)