Dell PERC RAID controller
Beric Farmer
beric.farmer at xe.com
Wed Jul 21 11:02:44 PDT 2004
Hi Brett.
--On July 20, 2004 3:54 PM -0600 Brett Glass <brett at lariat.org> wrote:
>
> What do folks here know about the problems (which Dell didn't describe in
> detail)? Is the new firmware compatible with FreeBSD's drivers? How can
> one update the firmware from FreeBSD (run their Linux update under Linux
> emulation, perhaps)?
>
I don't know if this will help or not, but we have two Dell PE 2450's with
the PERC 3/Si controller (which I believe was manufactured by Adaptec). On
both, we've had the controller lock up, hanging the machine. All drives
and the RAID container itself were fine. Unfortunately, one of these
times, the file system was corrupted beyond repair.
It was somewhat frustrating that the RAID controller turned out to fail
more frequently than a stand-alone hard drive. (Although, three of the
eight 9GB Seagate SCSI drives that shipped with the systems have failed
since we purchased them less than four years ago.)
One other problem I experienced with the controller happened after one of
the drives failed. The controller continued properly running on three
drives of a four drive RAID 5 array, but when we hot-swapped the failed
drive, the controller failed to automatically rebuild the array. It took a
couple of hours of trial and error and a couple calls to Dell tech support
to get the array to rebuild.
I can't remember which version of FreeBSD the systems were running at the
time the problems occurred.
After having these problems, we decided a firmware upgrade for the
controller couldn't hurt. We simply downloaded the update from Dell and
applied it (it was a floppy-based upgrade). Since then, we have had no
controller lock-ups, and when a drive failed, the controller automatically
rebuilt the array when the failed drive was hot-swapped.
However, we upgraded to a newer release of FreeBSD at the same time we
upgraded the firmware, so I don't know if the OS played a role or not.
Hope this is useful.
Beric
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