Compaq Proliant 8500 issue with Integrated SMART Array RAID Controller (ida)

[Andrew Heyn]

Hi,

I have a Compaq Proliant 8500 with the integrated SMART Array RAID
controller.  I recall seeing
"Symbios" and "ARM" on a chip on the center of the PCI module must be the
RAID controller.  I
used to have extreme problems even getting the system to boot up until I
used the SmartStart
CD and disabled the "Array Accelerator" for my one and only RAID1+0
Container.  (Before doing this) I would get numerous
ida0: soft write error and if the system did manage to boot up, a process
might read the disk, and
forever be stuck in some kernel routine between userland and the disk that
gets a block or whatever.
Now, I only get an occasional "ida0: soft read/write error" which
occasionally causes a 15 or so second delay.  The "Array Accelerator" for
the Integrated SMART array controller is 8MB of read-only cache.  Other
SMART Array models
like the 4200 have battery backed up cache that can be user-separated
between write and read cache.

I'm wondering if anybody has ever seen the problem mentioned above.

I would hate to have to replace the whole
PCI module because of some bad controller ram since that darn thing is
integrated, and would make useless the
internal bays if another raid card was added.  As a note, the contacts
between the hard drive and the drive module
have been cleaned out multiple times for all the drives in the array.  The
connection between the drive module and
the back of the computer is sturdy and clean.  There are only TWO cables in
this entire system that I know of, and one
is for the IDE CDROM, and one is for the floppy.  So, cabling cannot be a
problem.  I also have two working PSUs that
each have a 120V line going into it, so I doubt it's a lack of power.  Even
though 220V is recommended for both of them,
it works fine with even just one 120V line.

I asked the HP/Compaq forum and they weren't able to give me much more of an
answer than "check the cabling" and "blow
off the dust" which I found extremely irritating because the data is carried
on copper wires that resemble the pins found
on an IDE hard drive or floppy, not your standard "cabling."  I might
ultimately be wrong...but I doubt it.



Thanks,
Andrew