Brad Campbell wrote:
I've been running 3 together in one box for about 18 months, and four in
another for a year now... the on board BIOS will only pickup 8 drives,
but they work just fine under Linux and recognise all connected drives.
What distro and kernel ?
I tried this about 2 - 3 months ago and had problems whenever more than
two cards were in my system, even if only a single drive was installed.
I posted about it here (search for "multiple promise sata150 tx4
cards" back in January).
The symptoms were ata timeouts:
ata3: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata3: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata3: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata3: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata2: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata2: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
ata2: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
ata2: error=0x0c { DriveStatusError }
This would happen consistently with three controllers in, never with
two. I tried every possible combination of controllers and drives I
could think of, to eliminate any potential of broken hardware being the
cause.
I should probably give it another go, given there have been a couple of
minor kernel versions since then, but I'm surprised to hear you've had
it working for so long - no-one was able to give me a solution to my
problem at the time (I ended up getting a pair of two-channel SATA
cards) and I assumed it was a driver bug of some description. Promise,
of course, were useless, saying more than a single controller was an
unsupported configuration.
I have 11 drives in one box (on promise.. 2 on the on-board VIA and 1 on
PATA) and 15 drives in another (all across 4 promise cards).. all on
SATA150-TX4 cards..
Performance sucks.. but then when you put 15 drives on a single PCI
33Mhz bus what do you expect ?
Great for streaming media though.. (and cheap, and very reliable). The
only media errors I get are on the VIA controller. The promise
controllers have not had a single media error since they were installed.
I have no complaints about the performance (relatively speaking, of
course), but I've got the cards in a machine with multiple PCI-X busses,
so it's not really bottlenecked there.
CS
-
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
