ataraid's revenge! (Was: Re: A nasty ataraid experience.)

[Sean C. Farley]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, Bruce Simpson wrote:

> 6 months on, ataraid(4) did it again.
>
>   This time, I was lucky -- I caught in in time, but the damage to the 
> filesystem meant having to use fsdb to NULL out the affected inodes; 
> mounting read-only, tarring, and untarring across the network, after a 
> newfs, let me save the affected partition.
>   All I was doing at the time was srm'ing a few sensitive files; all 
> the processes wedged in WCHAN getblk. It seems ataraid(4) is not 
> robust against temporary drive/controller problems. The SMART logs on 
> the affected array drives all check out just fine, there are no bad 
> block remaps.
>
> So, time to either buy a hardware RAID controller, or move to ZFS...

Out of fear of what ataraid may do to me especially with Intel 
MatrixRAID[1], I switched to using gmirror awhile back, and it has 
worked well.  When I buy some new drives soon, I am considering using 
gvinum with 8.0, but I need to find out more.

Anyone know if I can boot off of a gvinum partition and/or how it works 
(or does not) with various label schemes?

Sean
   1. http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/ATA_issues_and_troubleshooting
-- 
scf at FreeBSD.org