RAID 5 - serious problem
Jeremy Chadwick
koitsu at FreeBSD.org
Wed Oct 15 11:46:01 PDT 2008
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:14:42AM +0100, Dieter wrote:
> > FreeBSD 7.0-Release
> > Intel D975XBX2 motherboard (Intel Matrix Storage Technology)
> > 3 WD Raptor 74 GB in a RAID 5 array
> > 1 WD Raptor 150 GB as a standalone disk
> > / and /var mounted on the standalone,, /usr on the RAID 5
> > I believe what happened was that one of the disks didn't respond for such a
> > long time, that is was marked "bad". And afterwards the same thing happened
> > for the other disks. When I try to boot the system, all three disks are
> > marked "Offline".
>
> > I am very desperate not to lose my data,
>
> In that case, step one is to use dd(1) to make a bit-for-bit copy of the
> three drives to some trusted media. Since they are marked bad/offline,
> you might need to move them to a controller that doesn't know anything
> about RAID. (Note that there is risk here, and in almost anything you do
> at this point.) Once you have this bit-for-bit backup, you can run any
> experiment you like to attempt to recover your data. If the experiment
> goes bad, you can dd the exact original contents back using dd, then
> try a different experiment. While you're at it, make a normal backup
> using dump(8) or whatever you normally use, of / and /var. Once you have
> *everything* backed up, you can do risky experiments like booting linux.
>
> My personal approach to avoiding data loss is (a) avoid buggy things like
> inthell and linux.
Interesting, being as we have another thread going as of late that seems
to link transparent data loss with AMD AM2-based systems with certain
models of Adaptec and possibly LSI Logic controller cards. I like Intel
as much as I like AMD -- but it's important to remember that it's
becoming more and more difficult to provide "flawless" stability on
things as the complexities increase.
And I have no idea what your beef is with Linux. If the OP is
successfully able to bring his array on-line using Linux, I would think
that says something about the state of things in FreeBSD, would you
agree? Both OSes have their pros and cons.
> (b) FFS with softdeps and the disk write cache turned off,
This has been fully discussed by developers, particularly Matt Dillon.
I can point you to a thread discussing why doing this is not only silly,
but a bad idea. And if you'd like, I can show you just how bad the
performance is on disks with WC disabled using UFS2 + softupdates. When
I say bad, I'm serious -- we're talking horrid. And yes, I have tried
it -- see PR 127717 for evidence that I *have* tried it. :-)
There *may* be advantages to disabling a disk's write cache when using a
hardware RAID controller that offers its own on-board cache (DIMMs,
etc.), but that cache should be battery-backed for safety reasons.
> (c) full backups.
I'm curious what your logic is here too -- this one is debatable, so I'd
like to hear your view.
> I don't have enough ports to run RAID. :-( The downside is that
> FreeBSD doesn't have NCQ support yet (when? when? when?) so writes are
> slow. :-(
NCQ will not necessarily improve write performance. There have been
numerous studies done proving this fact, and I can point you to those as
well. TCQ, on the other hand, does offer performance benefits when
there are a large number of simultaneous transactions occurring (think:
it's more like SCSI's command queueing).
I believe Andrey Elsukov is working on getting NCQ support working when
AHCI is in use (assuming I remember correctly).
--
| Jeremy Chadwick jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977. PGP: 4BD6C0CB |
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