Re: Updated SATA support patches for Intel ICH & Promise cards

From: David Schultz <das_at_FreeBSD.ORG>
Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 02:22:18 -0700
On Wed, May 05, 2004, Scott Long wrote:
> David Schultz wrote:
> >On Wed, May 05, 2004, Sren Schmidt wrote:
> >
> >>David Schultz wrote:
> >>
> >>>I have two SATA drives that are mirrored via ccd(4).  The
> >>>mirroring apparently introduced some sort of race that led to
> >>>problems, which started when ATAng was committed.  The specific
> >>>symptoms changed as the ata driver evolved, and varied from kernel
> >>>panics in the best case and data corruption in the worst case.
> >>>But the details of the problem aren't as important as the fact
> >>>that some aspect of Doug's patch fixes them!
> >>
> >>Have you considered using atacontrol to create an ATA RAID instead ?
> >>Does that work ? on an unpatched kernel ?
> >
> >
> >This is an Intel 875P motherboard, and I think the controller only
> >supports striping, not mirroring.  If this is not the case, I'd
> >happily try it, although it would take a while for me to find the
> >time to back up and migrate my data if there are any
> >incompatibilities.
> 
> The ICH5 controller on the southbridge has no concept of RAID.  It's
> just a SATA/IDE controller.  Your motherboard might have a BIOS that
> understands striping and/or mirroring the two SATA disks, but that is
> a purely software function and has nothing to do with the disk
> controllers.
> 
> I find with much chagrin how effective the marketing campaigns are for
> software RAID these days ;-)

Heh.  When I bought the motherboard, the documentation claimed it
supported RAID 0.  I didn't care about RAID 0 so I didn't
investigate further.  I just checked Intel's website, and it
appears that that selfsame motherboard now supports RAID 0 *and*
RAID 1.  I guess that just means Intel's newer BIOSes have
boot-time support for mirroring.  The scumbags don't mention
anywhere that this is software RAID...
Received on Thu May 06 2004 - 00:22:30 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Wed May 19 2021 - 11:37:53 UTC