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Date:      Tue, 29 Nov 2005 12:02:43 -0500
From:      Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>
To:        Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson@ury.york.ac.uk>
Cc:        Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org, =?iso-8859-1?Q?S=F8ren_Schmidt?= <sos@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Building new Athlon AMD64 Socket 939 or 940 machine
Message-ID:  <20051129120243.B64864@cons.org>
In-Reply-To: <1133271434.46168.9.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk>; from gavin.atkinson@ury.york.ac.uk on Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 01:37:14PM %2B0000
References:  <61FBEC57-424E-450F-A775-10E1F5E8DF92@cian.ws> <20051127215510.A17131@cons.org> <1133190443.41553.18.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk> <438B1F90.3090708@FreeBSD.org> <1133196263.41553.54.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk> <20051128130516.A36114@cons.org> <1133271434.46168.9.camel@buffy.york.ac.uk>

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Gavin Atkinson wrote on Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 01:37:14PM +0000: 
> On Mon, 2005-11-28 at 13:05 -0500, Martin Cracauer wrote:
> > > Hmm, well that's promising.  This is with:
> > > atapci1@pci0:7:0:       class=0x010485 card=0x5348108e chip=0x005410de
> > > rev=0xf3 hdr=0x00
> > >     vendor   = 'NVIDIA Corporation'
> > >     device   = 'nForce4 Serial ATA Controller'
> > >     class    = mass storage
> > >     subclass = RAID
> > > 
> > > I don't know if it makes any difference, but the board has on-board
> > > NVIDIA RAID, which I'm considerably less than impressed with.  I'll
> > > build one of them without the on-board RAID support and see if
> > > hot-insert works.  I don't have the logs (long story, but basically the
> > > RAID bios hosed my data) but I think it failed to notice the inserted
> > > disk, and was timing out while trying to select the channel when forced
> > > with an atacontrol reinit.
> > 
> > Do not use this for safety/raid1.
> > 
> > I have seen several reports that the NVidia software raid wipes out
> > the intact drive on warm boot when the machine reboots with one drive
> > bad.  Seems to do a random pick which drive to mirror to which other.
> 
> Thanks for confirming this - that is exactly the same behaviour as I
> have witnessed.  I've even managed to lose data from the disks without
> any OS involvement, purely by using the RAID BIOS.  I'm amazed how bad
> this controller is.

Just to make that clear: the controller works well (well, no NCQ), it
is just the BIOS support for the pseudo-hardware RAID on top that is
-uh- questionable.

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go, today.      http://www.freebsd.org/



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