Date: Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:19:48 -0700 (PDT) From: Jeff Richards <bsd24x7@yahoo.com> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: Multiple USB drives stability question Message-ID: <449180.49075.qm@web110112.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
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Is there a practical limit on the number of active USB drives with FreeBSD?= =A0 I've had stability issues using multiple USB drives as storage. My initial design goal was cheap, hot-swappable storage.=A0 I am only using= a 100MB network currently so throughput on the storage is not a problem as= I can't push the data to/from the drives faster than what my network reque= sts are.=A0=20 I first tried my setup on 7.0, then migrated to a newer PC, then upgraded t= o 7.2.=20 =A0 I have the following USB drive setup: 1 320GB gmirror (320x2) + gjournal + ufs2 1 1TB gmirror (1TBx2) + gjournal + ufs2 1 150GB gjournal=A0 + ufs2 I also have another 1TB gmirror (1TBx2) + gjournal but removed it.=A0 The s= ystem crashed when I used these drives (bacula or bonnie++) so I pulled the= m to test on another system. Recently my stability issue has been when I have been writing data to the 1= 50GB gjournal drive from the 320GB gmirror device (USB device -> USB device= ).=A0 It will be working fine, then all I/O stops on the 150GB drive.=A0 Th= e system remains responding to other USB devices etc. for a while.=A0 I try= rebooting and the system crashes with gjournal errors (didn't write down, = but I will later).=A0=20 Every time this happens the 1TB gmirror comes up fine but one of the 320GB = providers is missing.=A0 No problem after 'gmirror forget' and 'gmirror ins= ert'.=A0 Everything rebuilds fine.=A0 The 150GB gjournal drive is fine afte= r a 'fsck -y'. I do pair the gmirror drives to the same USB adapter.=A0 Found out after in= itial testing with multiple USB adapters that they do not appear standard e= nough to cross adapters like I would for a production server at work to pre= vent SPOF with an adapter. I have tried Linux as well with softraid and LVM2 on the same hardware.=A0 = It worked fine until I applied software updates and the udev took 30+ minut= es to boot.=A0 I went back to FreeBSD.=A0 Even when I crashed I was back up= in 2-5 minutes. I can and will provide more detail if requested.=A0 My concern is that the = issue seems to continue no matter what hardware/OS changes I try. Thanks in advance. =0A=0A=0A
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