ATA problems again ... general problem of ICH7 or ATA?

[Greg Byshenk]

On Mon, Aug 21, 2006 at 04:03:47AM +0200, Konstantin Saurbier wrote:
> Am 20.08.2006 um 18:20 schrieb Greg Byshenk:

> >What is different is that this was with a 3Ware RAID controller --
> >which made removing/raconfiguring/rebuilding much easier -- but I was
> >seeing the exact same errors.
 
> No your errors are not related. As of my experience (and the  
> experience of others) the controller forgetting or loosing drives is  
> a "feature" 3ware.
> We had similar problems with 3ware-7500-8 ATA controllers and i was  
> reported of the same errors with 3ware-9000 series. Our in-house  
> 3ware-9500S are not showing this kind of errors.
 
> This errors are not driver or OS dependent such as they appear on  
> FreeBSD as well on different Linux distros.
> Since not all controllers suffering of these errors it is maybe  
> depending on the firmware or board/chip revisions.

I hesitate to make too strong a statement on this matter, as I have
not done any deep investigation, however...

The explanation above does not appear consistent with my experience.
I am now using (and have used over the past several years) a number
of different 3Ware controllers (7000, 8000, and 9000 series) and have
not previously seen this problem.  Of course I have had drives fail
-- and in one case one port of one controller simply stopped working
-- but never this particular problem.

Further, the very same controller that demonstrated problems (in the
numerically identical server, performing the exact same jobs), had
not demonstrated this problem (over a period of more than six months)
until I installed the June 6.1 STABLE, after which the problem appeared
consistently, until installing the July 6.1 STABLE, at which point the
problem disappeared, and has not occurred since (despite my trying very
hard to make it do so).

It may well be that there is some bug in the 3Ware controllers, but 
my experience suggests that there is/was something else going on.  At
the very least, it suggests that there was something about the June
6.1 STABLE (but not the earlier or later versions) that was triggering
a 3Ware bug -- as my problems occurred only when running the June
6.1 STABLE, and that was the _only_ difference between the cases of
having problems and those of not having problems.


-- 
greg byshenk  -  gbyshenk at byshenk.net  -  Leiden, NL