hi, we buy a 3ware 7500-8 ata raid controller.we download the latest from everything (firmware update linux module etc). we use redhat9 with kernel 2.4.20-9. compile the 3ware's kernel module for this kernel which has plus two more changelog entry than rh9. put 8 pieces of 120GB maxtor hd in it. first use them as independent disks for a few days. it works perfectly. after that we'd like to create a hardware raid5 array with 7 disk and one sparedisk. we do it from the controller's bios, wait to finish the inicialization, boot into linux create one partition on /dev/sda and format it to ext3. my first question : - can we use mkfs.ext3 -R stride=16 /dev/sda1 in this case (since hardware raid use 64K chunk-size) or this options only for software raid? after we format it, start to copy back the data (about 250GB) from nfs. after about 2 minutes the kernel crash with some kind of io error on the 3ware controller. unfortunately we don't have time to write down the kernel's error message since this is one of our production enviroment server. what's more I wouldn't like to buy more such card to play with if it's not well functional. you can read the kernel log after that crash at the end of this mail. - do anybody use this card with hardware raid5? - is it better/faster... to use hardware raid5 or software raid5? - with this card the hardware or the software raid5 is the better choise? - is there any better way to copy the kernel crash messages then the paper and pen? thank you for your help in advance. yours. -- Levente the kernel log after the crash: May 3 01:05:09 red kernel: 3ware Storage Controller device driver for Linux v1.02.00.033. May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 02:0a.0 May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: PCI: Sharing IRQ 9 with 02:02.0 May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: scsi0 : Found a 3ware Storage Controller at 0x9400,IRQ: 9, P-chip: 1.3 May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: scsi0 : 3ware Storage Controller May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: 3w-xxxx: scsi0: AEN: WARNING: Unclean shutdown detected: Unit #0. May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: blk: queue c365da14, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: Vendor: 3ware Model: Logical Disk 0 Rev: 1.0 May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 00 May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: blk: queue c365dc14, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0xffffffff) May 3 01:05:10 red kernel: Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0 May 3 01:05:11 red kernel: SCSI device sda: 1440718080 512-byte hdwr sectors (737648 MB) May 3 01:05:11 red kernel: sda: sda1 .... May 3 01:05:56 red kernel: 3w-xxxx: scsi0: AEN: INFO: Initialization started: Unit #0.
