Promise SATA300 TX4 card issues

[Dag-Erling Smørgrav]

Nathan Butcher <n-butcher at fusiongol.com> writes:
> My system is amd64 with 2GB of RAM, four 500GB drives connected to my
> Promise SATA300 TX4 card in a raidz1 pool. For testing purposes, I have
> created a volume in my zpool, which houses a UFS file system created and
> accessed via GELI. I then use samba to copy data to and from the volume
> on another machine.
>
> While writing data to my volume, I am getting erratic CKSUM errors being
> "discovered" coming from my ZFS raidz1 (a look at zpool status after the
> write confirms this), and scrubbing the zpool just seems to discover
> more CKSUM errors. "zpool status" is telling me to replace some of my
> disks. This never happened before.

There is a known problem with Promise controllers and ZFS, probably
related to ATA_FLUSHCACHE.  The only known solution is to switch to a
non-Promise controller - Intel ICH works fine.  The ata maintainer is
aware of the issue but doesn't seem interested in fixing it.

DES
-- 
Dag-Erling Smørgrav - des at des.no