Compaq Proliant 8500 issue with Integrated SMART
ArrayRAIDController (ida)
Ted Mittelstaedt
tedm at toybox.placo.com
Mon Apr 11 10:08:06 PDT 2005
owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:
> On Saturday 09 April 2005 05:35, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>> owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I have a Compaq Proliant 8500 with the integrated SMART Array RAID
>>> controller. I recall seeing "Symbios" and "ARM" on a chip on the
>>> center of the PCI module must be the
>>> RAID controller. I
>>> used to have extreme problems even getting the system to boot
>>> up until I
>>> used the SmartStart
>>> CD and disabled the "Array Accelerator" for my one and only RAID1+0
>>> Container. (Before doing this) I would get numerous
>>> ida0: soft write error and if the system did manage to boot
>>> up, a process
>>> might read the disk, and
>>> forever be stuck in some kernel routine between userland and
>>> the disk that
>>> gets a block or whatever.
>>> Now, I only get an occasional "ida0: soft read/write error" which
>>> occasionally causes a 15 or so second delay. The "Array
>>> Accelerator" for the Integrated SMART array controller is 8MB of
>>> read-only cache. Other SMART Array models like the 4200 have
>>> battery backed up cache that can be user-separated between write
>>> and read cache.
>>>
>>> I'm wondering if anybody has ever seen the problem mentioned above.
>>>
>>> I would hate to have to replace the whole
>>> PCI module because of some bad controller ram since that darn thing
>>> is integrated, and would make useless the
>>> internal bays if another raid card was added. As a note, the
>>> contacts between the hard drive and the drive module
>>> have been cleaned out multiple times for all the drives in the
>>> array. The connection between the drive module and
>>> the back of the computer is sturdy and clean. There are only
>>> TWO cables in
>>> this entire system that I know of, and one
>>> is for the IDE CDROM, and one is for the floppy. So, cabling
>>> cannot be a problem. I also have two working PSUs that
>>> each have a 120V line going into it, so I doubt it's a lack of
>>> power. Even though 220V is recommended for both of them,
>>> it works fine with even just one 120V line.
>>>
>>> I asked the HP/Compaq forum and they weren't able to give me
>>> much more of an
>>> answer than "check the cabling" and "blow
>>> off the dust" which I found extremely irritating because the
>>> data is carried
>>> on copper wires that resemble the pins found
>>> on an IDE hard drive or floppy, not your standard "cabling." I
>>> might ultimately be wrong...but I doubt it.
>>
>> You should ask Windows questions in a Windows forum. Oh, you aren't
>> running Windows on this system? Must be FreeBSD 2.2 then, right?
>>
>> Ted
>>
>
>
> Right now, the machine runs FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. I've also
> tried a specially
> modified 6.0-CURRENT kernel upon suggestion of Matthew N.
> Dodd, and FreeBSD
> 4.11, but the nature of the problem never changed and no more useful
> information was able to be found. The same thing also
> happened running linux
> 2.4.27 and some version of Linux 2.6. I had given up hope
> that it was a
> software issue and was trying to see if any of the number of
> people on this
> list have ever had a machine that did this, or had details
> about somebody
> else's machine that did the same thing also. Also, the ROM on
> the controller
> and the primary system BIOS have been updated to the latest available
> versions. I have also updated the firmwares on the disk drives.
>
>
I can tell you right off the EISA versions of this controller don't
work at all.
Seems to me I recall some discussion a couple years back that there
were problems with certain versions of this controller. Check in
the mailing list archives, but more importantly check the google
news archives, as I thought I saw the thread on Usenet.
Ted
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