Compaq Proliant 8500 issue with Integrated SMART ArrayRAIDController (ida)

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

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