Hello, I have a RAID5 with 3x 1TB Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS SATA drives + 1 hot spare. I'd like to upgrade the firmware on two of the member drives using hdparm (I've already done this on the spare). The drives are on an ICH9, and the system uses Debian 5 (2.6.27) 64bit on an Intel "Core2" Xeon. The drives keep locking up, and needing a reset by the kernel, and I'd like to fix that (the firmware changelog indicates that the firmware has fixes for similar behaviour). The upgrade process takes about 40 seconds, so I'd prefer the drives to be "idle" during this time (blocking would also be all right, but if the kernel tries to access the drives, and then times out and resets them drives, then at the very least the firmware update will fail). So... an easy way to do this would be to fail one of the drives, and get it rebuilt onto the the spare, but of course, that puts the array into a non-redundant state for the duration of the operation. Some sort of temporary write-behind would be nice, but I understand that this is only supported for RAID1. Is migrating to RAID6, then failing out one drive at a time a reasonable option, or upping libata/md timeouts? Any other thoughts options? As I seem to be doing drive firmware updates more and more frequently recently (maybe I'm just getting unlucky), some sort of infrastructure to support doing this on a live system/array would be cool! Cheers, Tim. -- 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
