Highpoint hpt370 raid and spanning of disks

Ian Leonard
2004-01-14T14:44:54Z

Greetings,

I have tried to get the htpraid.o module working with spanned raid
disks with a hpt370 chip (it is a slightly older version). I did this:

1. Setup the raid in the hpt bios
2. loaded the hptraid.o module (kernel: 2.4.24)
3. fdisk /dev/ataraid/d0 and create /dev/ataraid/d0p1
I note that fdisk shows one partition of 80GB (which is correct because
I have 2x40GB disks).
4. mke2fs -j /dev/ataraid/d0p1
5. mount the partition and df shows 80GB.
6. run a test program that fills up the disk with many 1GB files. At
about the 32nd file I see errors from ext3 and also i/0 errors ide
controller. The error messages list the hdg device and indicate that
they can't find sectors in the second disk.

After a reboot, the raid bios marks the 2nd disk with 'broken span'.

I then tried a Promise FastTrak2000 card with very similar results. It
looks like once data is written to the second disk, something goes
wrong. Unlike the Highpoint (which produces large numbers of errors)
the Promise produces a few here and there.

I see from a previous posting that spanning is supported, so I maybe
missing something. Any help appreciated.

(BTW, this is cross-posted from linux-ide, which doesn't seem to be
working for me).

--
Ian Leonard

Please ignore spelling and punctuation - I did.