Updated SATA support patches for Intel ICH & Promise cards
David Schultz
das at FreeBSD.ORG
Thu May 6 02:22:30 PDT 2004
On Wed, May 05, 2004, Scott Long wrote:
> David Schultz wrote:
> >On Wed, May 05, 2004, Sren Schmidt wrote:
> >
> >>David Schultz wrote:
> >>
> >>>I have two SATA drives that are mirrored via ccd(4). The
> >>>mirroring apparently introduced some sort of race that led to
> >>>problems, which started when ATAng was committed. The specific
> >>>symptoms changed as the ata driver evolved, and varied from kernel
> >>>panics in the best case and data corruption in the worst case.
> >>>But the details of the problem aren't as important as the fact
> >>>that some aspect of Doug's patch fixes them!
> >>
> >>Have you considered using atacontrol to create an ATA RAID instead ?
> >>Does that work ? on an unpatched kernel ?
> >
> >
> >This is an Intel 875P motherboard, and I think the controller only
> >supports striping, not mirroring. If this is not the case, I'd
> >happily try it, although it would take a while for me to find the
> >time to back up and migrate my data if there are any
> >incompatibilities.
>
> The ICH5 controller on the southbridge has no concept of RAID. It's
> just a SATA/IDE controller. Your motherboard might have a BIOS that
> understands striping and/or mirroring the two SATA disks, but that is
> a purely software function and has nothing to do with the disk
> controllers.
>
> I find with much chagrin how effective the marketing campaigns are for
> software RAID these days ;-)
Heh. When I bought the motherboard, the documentation claimed it
supported RAID 0. I didn't care about RAID 0 so I didn't
investigate further. I just checked Intel's website, and it
appears that that selfsame motherboard now supports RAID 0 *and*
RAID 1. I guess that just means Intel's newer BIOSes have
boot-time support for mirroring. The scumbags don't mention
anywhere that this is software RAID...
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