ATA Raid (Adaptec 1200A) on Freebsd 6.0

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

Hi Demian,

  I've got 2 servers using these cards, and have come to the same
conclusions.  I prefer not to use the highpoint driver myself
simply due to the concern that the highpoint driver might not be
that well maintained in the future compared to the native atapi driver.

  Because in both of the servers of mine the disks are not in
removable trays, you have to take the server down to replace a failed
disk anyway, so there's little to gain with a raid driver that can
rebuild the array on the fly, etc.

  Here's a very crude script along these lines:

#!/bin/sh
space=" "
raidstatus=`atacontrol status 0 | grep "READY"`
if (test $raidstatus = $space)
then
# echo "A drive has failed in the raid array" | mail -s Disk\ drive\ down
8675309 at sprint.com
else
fi
exit

  This is assuming your carrying a cell phone of course.

Ted


>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Demian
>Sent: Wednesday, March 08, 2006 11:00 PM
>To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: ATA Raid (Adaptec 1200A) on Freebsd 6.0
>
>
>Hello all,
>
>I have just recently setup a RAID 1 system running FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE
>on an Adpatec 1200A card. Getting the system installed and
>working seems
>to have been the easy part. What I am trying to do now is find a simple
>and reliable way to monitor the array. So far I have tried to get
>raidutil. acccli, and hptraidconf (Highpoint software) working.
>The only
>thing that works is atacontrol. Here is what I have come to discover
>(please tell me if I'm wrong) ..
>
>raidutil is for asr systems (I'm have ar0)
>acccli is for aac systems (again, ar0)
>hptraidconf requires the highpoint driver which I don't seem to need in
>6.0. However, the software does work with some minor tweaking of
>symlinks in /usr/lib.
>
>So, here's my question. It is reasonable to setup a cron job to monitor
>the output of atacontrol status ar0 and if I see anything other than
>READY, send an alert? I would then use the cards bios to handle the
>rebuild of the array with the new drive.
>
>The other option that I can think of is to load the Highpoint
>Rocketraid
>driver but I don't know if that's a good idea or not. I'm assuming the
>hptraidconf software will detach the controllers if I'm using their
>driver. However, all I did to get the system installed as to create the
>array using the cards bios and put the 6.0 disc in. The installer found
>ar0 and I installed to it.
>
>Any help would be greatly appreciated. I've looked and looked all over
>google and the this mailing list but most posts are about different
>cards using asr.
>
>Thanks much,
>Demian
>
>p.s. Here is some info that my prove useful
>
>FreeBSD godzilla 6.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE #2: Wed Mar  8
>21:40:38
>PST 2006     root at godzilla:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/GODZILLA  i386
>
>[root at godzilla] /usr/home/demian# dmesg | egrep 'HighPoint|ar0'
>atapci1: <HighPoint HPT370 UDMA100 controller> port
>0xac00-0xac07,0xb000-0xb003,0xb400-0xb407,0xb800-0xb803,0xbc00-0xbcff
>irq 18 at device 9.0 on pci0
>ar0: 58644MB <HighPoint v2 RocketRAID RAID1> status: READY
>ar0: disk0 READY (master) using ad4 at ata2-master
>ar0: disk1 READY (mirror) using ad6 at ata3-master
>
>I have three drives connected to the 1200A. FreeBSD is installed on ad4
>and mirrored to ad6. ad5 is a stand alone drive.
>
>[root at godzilla] /usr/home/demian# atacontrol status ar0
>ar0: ATA RAID1 subdisks: ad4 ad6 status: READY
>
>[root at godzilla] /usr/home/demian# atacontrol list
>ATA channel 0:
>    Master:      no device present
>    Slave:       no device present
>ATA channel 1:
>    Master: acd0 <AOpen 12X DVD-ROM/ASH 01112001/R22>     Slave:
>no device present
>ATA channel 2:
>    Master:  ad4 <Maxtor 6Y060L0/YAR41VW0> ATA/ATAPI revision 7
>    Slave:   ad5 <Maxtor 6Y160P0/YAR41BW0> ATA/ATAPI revision 7
>ATA channel 3:
>    Master:  ad6 <Maxtor 6Y060L0/YAR41VW0> ATA/ATAPI revision 7
>    Slave:       no device present
>
>
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