vinum stability?

[Jeremy Ehrhardt]

I have a quad-core Opteron nForce4 box running 6.1-RELEASE/amd64 with a 
gvinum RAID 5 setup comprising six identical SATA drives on three 
controllers (the onboard nForce4 SATA, which is apparently two devices, 
and one Promise FastTrak TX2300 PCI SATA RAID controller in IDE mode), 
combined into one volume named "drugs". We've been testing this box as a 
file server, and it usually works fine, but smartd reported a few bad 
sectors on one of the drives, then a few days later it crashed while I 
was running chmod -R on a directory on "drugs" and had to be manually 
rebooted. I can't figure out exactly what happened, especially given 
that RAID 5 is supposed to be robust against single drive failures and 
that despite the bad blocks smartctl claims the drive is healthy.

I have three questions:
1: what's up with gvinum RAID 5? Does it crash randomly? Is it 
considered stable? Will it lose data?
2: am I using a SATA controller that has serious problems or something 
like that? In other words, is this actually gvinum's fault?
3: would I be better off using a different RAID 5 system on another OS?

Jeremy Ehrhardt
jeremye at caltech.edu