Re: Quick question on Software RAID support.

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 11:33:41PM +0200, Ville Herva wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2002 at 06:30:01PM +0000, you [Mark Cooke] wrote:
> > Hi Alan,
> > 
> > Just a note that I have almost exactly the setup you outlined on a 
> > KT7A-RAID, HPT370 onboard.
> > 
> > I have a single disk on each highpoint chain, and a 3rd (parity) on 
> > one of the onboard 686B channels.
> > 
> > I have been seeing odd corruptions since I setup the system as RAID-5 
> > though.  Have you seen any reports of 686B ide corruption recently (or 
> > RAID-5 for that matter) ?
> > 
> > kernel 2.4.18pre6... just compiling pre9-ac3...
> > Athlon MP 1500+, mem=nopentium apm=off, NvAGP=0 in X-setup.
> 
> After months of testing, we found that KT7-RAID (we tested KT7A-RAID as
> well) is basicly impossible to get working reliably. It *always* corrupted
> data from HPT370, no matter what we tried. It seemed VIA PCI problem as
> things like the pci slot of the nic, network load, nic model etc greatly
> affected corruption rate. (Via 686b ide never corrupted data, but then again
> it's integrated in the south bridge and perhaps avoids full PCI path). Our
> combination was software RAID0 (one disk on ide2 and ide3 (HPT370
> channels)).
> 
> We ditched the board deep, took an Abit ST6-RAID (i815+HPT370) and have had
> no problems since. 
> 
> My position is that for heavy PCI load (additional IDE adapters etc), stay
> away from Via.
> 
> BTW: I have a little program to stress the raid volume (or any disk device
> for that matter) that I used to trigger the corruption. It is destructive
> for the data, though. I can mail it to you, if you like.

I'd like to try that, too, so if you can send me the program ...

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs