Brad Campbell wrote:
I have 3 cards with 12 drives in one box, and 4 card with 15 drives in
another.
They work just dandy. They are not the fastest machines in the world,
and the PCI but sometime groans under the strain, but it's reliable and
error-free.
Are these the same cards I have ?
Can you send an lspci -vv please? I did have some strange problems with
the BIOS setting up weird timing modes on some of the cards. This did
not present a reliability problem for me, just performance however.
I attached lspci output to my original post. I have also included it on
the end of this one (with a slight difference regarding which slots the
cards were in, but that makes no difference to the problem).
My 1st quick and dirty test would be to boot with a UP kernel. (Only
because that is all I have also) And to try a vanilla kernel.org kernel
rather than the Redhat one. (I have one machine on 2.6.10 and one on
2.6.15-git11. Both are solid)
I have tried the latest Fedora Core 4 kernel, both SMP and UP. I have
also tried their 2.6.11 UP kernel (2.6.11-1.1369_FC4).
All exhibit the problem, although it appears that the 2.6.11 kernel
takes slightly longer for it to appear (maybe 10 vs 5 seconds).
I have not tested with a vanilla kernel. I'll try to do it tomorrow
(although I suspect it won't help).
bklaptop:~>ssh storage1 uname -a
Linux storage1 2.6.15-git11 #1 Sun Jan 15 22:25:19 GST 2006 i686 GNU/Linux
bklaptop:~>ssh srv uname -a
Linux srv 2.6.10 #4 Mon Feb 14 23:10:38 GST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux
Are you using the cards in standard PCI 33Mhz Slots? I recall an issue a
while ago where someone had a big problem with the cards in 66Mhz Slots.
The cards were all in PCI-X slots ranging from 64/66 to 64/133.
I tried placing one of the cards in the only regular 32/33 PCI slot my
motherboard has and it does not help (this is the configuration where
the attached lspci was taken).
Another test I'd like you to try if you would, is place one or two
drives on each controller, so you only have 3 in the system.. and then
try to reproduce the error.
This configuration also produces the error.
Something else I tried was some crappy dual-port SIL-based SATA card
with two of the Promise TX4s, and that worked without a problem. While
I'm waiting to find out what this is, I might buy another one and use
the two of them temporarily so I can build my RAID array, at least.
Thanks for your help.
CS
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