vinum stability?

Ian Jefferson ijeff at sandbox.ca
Sat Jul 8 04:49:32 UTC 2006


One thing you might consider is that gvinum is quite flexible.

The subdisks in vinum that make up a raid 5 plex are partitions.   
This means you can create raid 5 sets without using each entire disk   
and the disks don't need to be the same model or size.  It's also  
handy for spares.  If you start having media errors a new partition  
on the offending disk might be one option but any other disk that  
support a partition size equal to the ones used as subdisks in the  
raid 5 plex will also do.

Having said that I'm finding it tricky to understand and use gvinum.   
It seems to be on the mend though, the documentation is improving and  
the raid 5 set I had running seemed pretty stable for a 40 minute  
iozone benchmark.  That's all I've done with it to date.

IJ

On Jul 6, 2006, at 8:56 AM, Jeremy Ehrhardt wrote:

> 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
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