nVidia RAID + FreeBSD 6.0

James Long stable at museum.rain.com
Mon Jan 30 00:51:20 PST 2006


> Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:08:21 +0000 (GMT)
> From: Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson at ury.york.ac.uk>
> Subject: Re: nVidia RAID + FreeBSD 6.0
> To: Christian Brueffer <chris at unixpages.org>
> Cc: freebsd-stable at freebsd.org, sos at freebsd.org
> 
> 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.

Gee, no RAID at all is reliable when both disks work!  A RAID solution 
that has problems when one disk fails is pretty darn worthless as a 
RAID solution.

...
> 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 
...

"Doctor Sun, it hurts when I do this."
"Well, don't do that."

Not the best response one might hope for.


Regards,

Jim



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