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

Thu Sep 9 03:13:02 PDT 2004

Hi Carroll,

I posted the original problem report you referred to earlier.

3ware are looking into the problem.  It looks like it's a problem with
3ware's firmware (perhaps related to some anomaly in the way that Maxtor
disks behave).

It would appear that it's only a problem when the disk has errors.

On one machine,  I can reproduce this problem by dd'ing from the RAID5 
array:

	dd if=/dev/twed0s1h iseek=137510 bs=1m of=/dev/null

On that machine I have the lockup will *always* be preceded by the
following message on the console:

	twe0: AEN: <twe0: port 3: sector repair occurred>

Do you have any error messages on the console?

I think that the disk I have on port 3 is flakey.  I could replace the
disk,  but I'm waiting until 3ware get back to me / issue a fix so I can
have some reasonable idea that the problem is fixed.

3ware *have* been looking into this problem,  and I think have
established that it's a firmware rather than a driver issue (it occurs
with other OSes as well apparently).  I don't know how close they are to
being able to fix this.

We buy all our new machines with Western Digital disks (and 3ware
controllers).  No problems yet (and we have about 10 of them - more than 
we have with Maxtor disks).

(BTW I have established over a period of months that this problems
existed with various versions of the driver and firmware dating back to
2003.  It still exists with the latest FBSD driver and 3ware firmware:
FE7X 1.05.00.068)

Carroll Kong wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
>>http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
>>To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>>
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> 
> 