ICH5R, ICH7R or Promise PDC20378 RAID?

[Philippe Lang]

owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:

>> 1) With the Promise controller, after simulating a disk problem
>> (shutdown - disk disconnection - reboot - shutdown - disk
>> reconnection - reboot), I wasn't able to rebuild the array at all,
>> either with "atacontrol rebuild ar0" or from the bios. I suspect a
>> spare disk is necessary for a complete rebuild.
>> 
>> 2) With the ICH5R controller, installation went fine too. If I
>> disconnect a disk, the system still boots, but when I plug the disk
>> back (computer shut down), no boot is possible anymore. At boot, a
>> kernel panic says: "softdep_setup_inomapdep". No array rebuild is
>> possible from the bios, so I'm stuck. 
>> 
>> 
>> I use freebsd 6.1 RELEASE, with the latest BIOS for the motherboard,
>> and 2 SATA 1.0 Western Digital 160GB disks. I'm trying to configure
>> RAID 1. 
>> 
>> I'm surprised I have so many problems. Am I doing anything wrong?
>> With INTEL hardware controllers for SCSI disks, I never had any
>> problems until now. Does anyone successfully use another ASUS board,
>> and is able to rebuild the array, without rebooting?
>> 
> 
> Few things I noticed about the on-board Promise chipset on
> ASUS that it is very poorly designed. If you do the
> unplug/replug test, it most likely won't work, you need to
> use a spare drive or re-format the drive and then replug it.
> 
> It also goes out of sync very often, so you want to make sure
> you're running consistency checks at least once a month.
> 
> Sometimes when one of the RAID-1 drives develops bad sectors,
> the whole array won't boot until you unplug one of the
> drives, and plug a spare one.
> 
> My conclusion, if you need something stable, don't use the
> onboard raid, get a RAID card even the cheap ones will do better job!!

Hi,

Thanks for the confirmation the onboard controller is not the way to
go... What reliable and good raid controller would you recommend for a
simple RAID 1 in SATA?

---------------
Philippe Lang
Attik System