Not that I wish bad luck on anyone, but I always enjoy reading about problems others have had and how they solved them, so I don't have to learn the hard way. Hopefully your situation gets sorted out. I can only second (and third, etc) the motion to do SMART tests on all drives before putting them in service, and add that you should really do a short test daily and a long test at least weekly if possibly. Basically you just can't trust consumer drives at all these days. smartmontools and rsync are probably my most-loved open source packages these days. I usually get 1 out of 10 bad out of the box now (some remappable at least) and a handful then fail quickly too. Most of them haven't gone three years so I can't say if they fail completely, but they seem to be lasting ok with occasional bad blocks. I'm very interested in the relative SW raid / HW raid performance. I have both in service (two raid 5 sets are actually the same size with the same number of components) and see roughly the same as you mention. One difference that I see is that HW raid should generate fewer interrupts and lower bus traffic. In the one area I used HW raid (a 3ware 8 port PATA, 8x250GB Maxtor, 2xOpteron), it was specifically because the motherboard chipset (or its interaction with Linux at least) was crap, and couldn't handle the interrupt load under bonnie++. So this could be a factor. It also goes to show that burning the machine in (with bonnie++ or similar) is a very good step. At least you catch these things before they're in service... Anyway, good luck with the new drives. -Mike Harry Mangalam wrote: > Hi All, > >>From the traffic, this list seems to be heavily slanted towards the SW aspect > of Linux RAID, but there have been a few postings (other than mine) about the > HW aspects of it. So, apologies for the verbarea on the HW aspects, but at > least a few people have told me that this running monologue of raid troubles > has been useful, so herein, some more. If I'm reiterating what is part of a > FAQ, please let me know, but I read a lot of them and didn't stumble across > much of this. > > > short version: test ALL your disks before you use them, especially in a RAID > set, especially the 'recertified' ones. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
