Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 11:28:25 -0600 (MDT) From: "Kenneth D. Merry" <ken@kdm.org> To: mike@sentex.net (Mike Tancsa) Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG, scsi@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: AHC errors. Bad disk or bad firmware, or bug in driver ? Message-ID: <199908091728.LAA29302@panzer.kdm.org> In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19990809130844.00eb8d50@staff.sentex.ca> from Mike Tancsa at "Aug 9, 1999 01:08:44 pm"
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Mike Tancsa wrote... > >It smells like bogus firmware, but it's kinda hard to say. You might check > >to see whether there is new firmware available for that disk. Quantum has > >firmware and firmware loaders on their ftp site. > > > >You would probably do a lot better if you went to 3.x/CAM. The new CAM > >SCSI subsystem can generally handle unruly drives much better than the > >old SCSI subsystem. (In fact, we used Quantum Atlas II's with bogus > >firmware to test some of the error recovery code.) > > Thanks for having a look. I do plan to upgrade the box to 3.x/CAM. > However, its a big busy box with a lot of users and services, so it will > take us a bit. We are also looking at a Legacy external RAID box to deploy > with this new server. Hmmm... While on the topic, what would you reccomend > as an external RAID box ? The Legacy is about $5-6K USD which I guess is > reasonable with 4 8gig drives. If anyone knows SCSI, I guess it would be > you and Justin ;-) Yeah, I understand, it takes a while to upgrade. As far as RAID boxes, I'm not sure I would recommend anything, because I don't have any direct experience with external RAID boxes. I will throw out a couple of things, though: - Charles Sprickman <spork@super-g.com> has had a fair bit of trouble with multiple channels on a single CMD array. I'm not sure whether he is still having problems. - On the other hand, Karl Denninger <karl@Denninger.Net>, has had good success with CMD controllers. - ftp.cdrom.com uses a Mylex external RAID controller, and I think other folks have gotten good results with them as well. For a small caveat (i.e. you shouldn't normally run into this problem, but you could) see my mail exchange with Joe Greco from early July. Just search for "DAC960SX" and you should see it. The bug in question was a FreeBSD bug, not really a bug with the controller. - I've seen various people mention other external RAID controllers on the lists, but I can't remember which. I'd suggest looking through the freebsd-scsi archives. I've never heard of a Legacy RAID box. Does the 5-6K include the drives or not? And 8 gig drives? One thing you don't want to skimp on is drive quality...most 8 gig SCSI drives I remember seeing are pretty low-end. I would recommend sticking with high-end Seagate or IBM disks. You'll want something that does tagged queueing, and handles a reasonable number of transactions. And, most importantly, you'll want a controller without nasty firmware bugs. :) FreeBSD/CAM has a tendency to expose problems that don't crop up as often in other OSes. Ken -- Kenneth Merry ken@kdm.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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