nVidia RAID + FreeBSD 6.0

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Sun, 29 Jan 2006, Christian Brueffer wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 04:46:52PM +1030, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
>> I am looking at getting a motherboard based on nForce 3 or 4, and I am
>> wondering if the RAID will be usable?
> 
> Be aware though that there have been reports on the lists of data loss
> in connection with NVIDIA RAIDs.  This seems to also happen on other
> operating systems.

In my experience, they seem to be reliable while both disks work, but when 
a disk needs to be rebuilt the RAID BIOS seem to pick the source disk at 
random, as opposed to something radical like using the only valid disk as 
the source.

Originally I thought this was a FreeBSD issue, but replies to my post 
sugggested it was a common problem, and not just limited to FreeBSD. 
Indeed, on the hardware I was using (a Sun X2100 server), Solaris had the 
same problem, and about 50% of the time you'd end up with corrupted or 
blank disks after a rebuild.  Sun have now stopped claiming in the 
specifications that these machines support RAID, and I'm now using FreeBSD 
pseudoraid on them.

Gavin