Adaptec 2400A problems, tests & observations

[Matt Staroscik]

This is a crosspost of a thread I began on -questions. To summarize 
previous posts: my Adaptec 2400A RAID card, with 2 Maxtor 160GB drives 
(model 6Y160P0) in a RAID-1, corrupts data and produces kernel panics under 
heavy activity. This is under 4.8 (plain vanilla install), ECS L7VTA 
motherboard (KT400), 512MB RAM, one vr NIC (on motherboard), 1 dc NIC 
(PCI), 1 Matrox Millennium II PCI video card. The 2400A is supported by the 
asr driver that is built into the GENERIC kernel.

(Those of you with 2400A's: what motherboard and hard drives are you using? 
Those of you with other ATA RAID cards: what's reliable and bootable?)

After a lot of testing I have discovered some interesting things but I am 
not any closer to a solution.

- I put an old spare drive on the motherboard's IDE bus, did a basic 
install and thrashed the heck out of it to rule out problems with CPU, RAM, 
and other non-RAID components. This worked great. The system will be nice 
and fast when I get it stable! :)

- I then put the same spare on the RAID card -- not as part of any array, 
but as "just a disk." I reinstalled 4.8 and thrashed it good -- cvsupping 
new source, buildworld, etc. No problems. (The RAID array was not in the 
system at all.)

- Then I separately tested each of the Maxtor 160s as "just a disk" on the 
2400A, first clobbering the RAID data. Each disk got a fresh 4.8 install 
and the same build/install world/kernel routine, plus some other big file 
operations that caused problems for the array -- like deleting /usr/obj/*. 
No problems!

- I have also done every imaginable type of cable swap and wiggle. I am as 
sure as I can be that there are no gross hardware faults in this system.

I am currently re-running Maxtor's utilities on the 160's but I don't 
expect to find any problems. Assuming the disks check out as good again I 
will have ruled out everything except some kind of bug or subtle hardware 
defect that ONLY effects RAID-1 -- and perhaps only with my hardware 
combination, as I know many others use this card with great success.

Oh, I haven't tested RAID-0. I don't intend to use it, but I will make a 
striped array and see how it goes just for fun. I will also try a Linux or 
Windows install too, to try and determine if this is a FreeBSD-specific 
problem.

Cheers,
Matt