asr monitoring

[Douglas K. Rand]

Simon> I would contact 3ware about this and make sure you are running
Simon> latest firmware on the drives and the controller as well as the
Simon> motherboard.

I know that I'm not at the most recent rev of the BIOS on the 3ware
cards, but I'm also sure that I'm running different BIOS revs on all
three cards.

My experience in the past with 3ware support has been less than
satisfactory. Sure, I'm not running a supported OS (yet), but the guy
at 3ware is never very helpful. (It always seems to be the same guy.)

Simon> The controller does ECC checks on all reads and writes, which
Simon> is how it knows when a drive fails. FreeBSD should have very
Simon> little to do with this as 3ware is a pure hardware RAID.

I agree, but I haven't had much luck persuading 3ware of that view
point. 

Simon> I would try fixing the problem before trying adaptec or any
Simon> other brand, for that matter. You may end up with even worse
Simon> problems.

We've been fighting this problem for months now, and while I'd like to
get it solved, I really need to get some systems up and into
production. I've been doing some performance tests, and the Adaptec
card falls pretty short of the 3ware card, most likely because of the
64 bit interface that the 3ware card has, and the Adaptec is only 32
bit. 

Simon> I heard more bad things about adaptec RAID than 3ware.

This is not good news.  :(

Simon> It could very well be that several of your drives are bad and
Simon> 3ware just can't pick up on it, but who knows, ask 3ware :-)

I also thought that the drives were suspect. But after running IBM's
drive fitness test, going so far as to have it erase the entire disk
and then verify the media afterwards, all the disks pass this test.