3Ware Escalade Issues

Charles Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Wed Feb 22 10:13:24 PST 2006


On Feb 22, 2006, at 12:31 PM, Don O'Neil wrote:
>>> 3) Is there some way I can do a faster FSCK, or perhaps 'fool'  
>>> the system
>>> into thinking the file system is clean?
>
>> If you update to 5.x or later, you can use background FSCK rather  
>> than
> having to
>> wait for the FSCK to complete the way it does under 4.x.
>
> I wasn't aware 5.x could do this. My next question is how are my  
> existing
> apps going to be affected by upgrading to 5.x?

If you install the 4.x compatibility libraries, your old 4.x binaries  
should continue to work just fine.  However, you will want to rebuild  
as much of your existing software under 5.x as possible.

>> Also, if you update to 5.x, you can run the smartmon tools, which  
>> will let
> you
>> do a drive self-test using SMART, this will give much better  
>> information
> about
>> what is going on with the drive, and also give an estimate of its  
>> remaining
>> lifespan.
>
> Yes, this would help a lot!!!

Well, once you're running 5.x, install smartmon and run: "smartctl -t  
long /dev/ad0", or whatever the right device is.

>> How old are the drives, if you know?
>
> They're less than 2 years old, and still under warranty. This is  
> the second
> drive to fail and it's driving me nuts.
>
> They're Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y250P0 250 GB PATA drives...  
> Never had a
> problem with that particular drive until this batch.
>
> Can anyone suggest some good 250GB PATA drives for me to use? I  
> might as
> well swap them all out since I'm starting over. The 6000 series  
> Escalade
> card I'm using doesn't support anything more than 250 GB.

I've had somewhat better luck with the so-called "special edition"  
variants of the drives, such as the WD1200JB, which have more cache  
RAM and a longer warranty period than the generic versions....

-- 
-Chuck



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