ICH5R, ICH7R or Promise PDC20378 RAID?

[Philippe Lang]

owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 10:18:05AM +0200, Philippe Lang wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I've got two boxes that would be perfect for a small server. The
>> motherboards are: 
>> 
>> - ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe, with ICH5R and Promise PDC20378
>> - ASUS P5WD2, with ICH7R
>> 
>> I intend to install FreeBSD 6.1, and I wonder which chipset you would
>> recommend me for RAID 1? I need something rock-solid, of course...
>> 
> I'm running -STABLE on a P4C800-E.  I've never had a problem
> with the PDC20378.  Recently, I added two drives on the ICH5R
> with no issues.  A little benchmarking shows the ICH5R to be a little
> faster. 

Hi,

I wasn't as lucky as Doug with my ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe board, both with
the ICH5R and Promise RAID controller.

1) With the Promise controller, after simulating a disk problem
(shutdown - disk disconnection - reboot - shutdown - disk reconnection -
reboot), I wasn't able to rebuild the array at all, either with
"atacontrol rebuild ar0" or from the bios. I suspect a spare disk is
necessary for a complete rebuild.

2) With the ICH5R controller, installation went fine too. If I
disconnect a disk, the system still boots, but when I plug the disk back
(computer shut down), no boot is possible anymore. At boot, a kernel
panic says: "softdep_setup_inomapdep". No array rebuild is possible from
the bios, so I'm stuck.


I use freebsd 6.1 RELEASE, with the latest BIOS for the motherboard, and
2 SATA 1.0 Western Digital 160GB disks. I'm trying to configure RAID 1.

I'm surprised I have so many problems. Am I doing anything wrong? With
INTEL hardware controllers for SCSI disks, I never had any problems
until now. Does anyone successfully use another ASUS board, and is able
to rebuild the array, without rebooting?

Thanks for your time,

Regards,

----------------------------------
Philippe Lang, Ing. Dipl. EPFL
Attik System
rte de la Fonderie 2
1700 Fribourg
Switzerland
http://www.attiksystem.ch

Tel:  +41 (26) 422 13 75
Fax:  +41 (26) 422 13 76