3ware 7506, FreeBSD 4.x, Maxtor Disks & SMART Problems.

[Carroll Kong]

I tried using the SmartD 5.33 (CVS).  It appeared to work, but did not pick
up anything in the next crash.  I noticed some temperature changes, and I
plan on running some difference tests, but nothing out of the ordinary.

This time the crash hung a lot of httpds and got them stuck into the D
state.  We had something like this happen before ... but now that I think
about it, it matches the experience of Jason almost perfectly.

Upon lockup, sometimes we still have partial control of the system.  The
processes waiting on the 3ware card cannot be killed.  The web sites that
are still in cache are servable.

It occurred when a big I/O request was going through (along with the normal
web traffic).  The odd thing is, it's not a function of raw I/O, since our
definition of big I/O was simply 3-4MB/sec according to iostat.  It seems
over time it just... well it just goes kaput if you push it a bit hard after
a long days run of non-stop I/Os.

The initial fsck we do runs at 17MB/sec at far more transactions per second.
Anyway, I am convinced the problem is somehow related to the 3ware system
(either the disks, the controller or something).  Originally I was looking
at other possibilities, but seeing people's experiences here, and a
colleague of mine's experience, something fishy is going on.

I am leaning towards a full hdd swap, seems like I will have to replace one
disk at a time and let it rebuild slowly to eventually swap out all the
disks.  I am able to get this problem to occur faster and faster now,
unfortunately it is a production box and we would much rather it not.  And I
am going to switch off to Seagate instead of Maxtor.  Despite using
3ware+maxtor on other machines here, (but they have considerably less load),
it's just too much of a coincidence that 3 different people including myself
have had problems with 3ware+maxtor whereas you can easily find that many
and more that have it working fine with another vendor.



- Carroll Kong
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carroll Kong" <me at carrollkong.com>
To: "Jason Thomson" <jason.thomson at mintel.com>; <so14k at so14k.com>
Cc: <vkayshap at amcc.com>; <freebsd-stable at freebsd.org>
Sent: Wednesday, September 08, 2004 3:24 PM
Subject: Re: 3ware 7506, FreeBSD 4.x, Maxtor Disks & SMART Problems.


> Hi, in reference to this
> http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2004-June/007828.html
>
> I have a FreeBSD 4.10-p2 system, using a 7450 with 4xMAXTOR 6L080J4  (80
> gig) disks.
>
> Raid 5 setup.
>
>       Monitor version: ME7X 1.01.00.035
>       Firmware version: FE7X 1.05.00.036
>       BIOS version: BE7X 1.08.00.044
>
>
> (Firmware 7.5.3 basically).
>
> I am also having the same problems you are having.  Randomly under heavy
I/O
> the system will just halt I/O requests.  No error messages on the console,
> it would just start to hang and halt completely.  (no kernel panics at
all).
>
> I believe I have the same problem you do.  Were you able to resolve the
> issue or narrow it down?  The machine is not local, but I am curious if
you
> did resolve it, what version of FreeBSD did you have?  What firmware?  And
> did you have to do the powermax testing on all the disks or not?
>
> I cannot easily do the powermax testing yet, and my firmware is older and
I
> am still running into this problem (which should have all the twe driver
> fixes).
>
> I tried using "Smartmontools" to verify if the Maxtor disks are okay since
> they only work for Linux + 3Ware.
>
> Thanks in advance!
>
>
>
> - Carroll Kong
>
>
>
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