3Ware 8506 Series, 3DM, Upgrading to 9000 Series

[Michael R. Wayne]

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 06:28:16PM -0400, Carroll Kong wrote:
> 
> What harddisks are you using?  Are you using maxtors as well?  I am
> beginning to believe it might be some weird issue with maxtors + 3wares in
> communicating errors.  At least one other member here noticed that as well
> and the other gentleman with the 7506 problem noticed that characteristic
> against a set of 10 3ware cards.

We recently had a failure which might be relevant so I'll note the
details here.

   8506-12 controller
   4 WESTERN DIGITAL 250GB SATA - RAID 5
   FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE-p11

One disk out of the RAID 5 took some errors.  The controller pulled
it out of the RAID but, due to misconfigured email settings (now
corrected), we did not find out for about a week.  During that time,
the server would reboot every couple of days with no log messages.
Removing the failed drive stopped the reboots.

3DM Version 1.10.00.011 never actually sent an rebuild command to
the RAID - had to reboot to the BIOS to start it.

Two attempts to rebuild with the failed drive did not work, replaced
with a spare, started the rebuild from the BIOS and 3 hours later
everything was fine.

/\/\ \/\/