Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 14:02:42 -0400 From: Beric Farmer <beric.farmer@xe.com> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Dell PERC RAID controller Message-ID: <6B8A29C7C35B1EF902FF4FFD@[192.168.1.102]> In-Reply-To: <6.1.1.1.2.20040720145450.0604eb18@localhost> References: <6.1.1.1.2.20040720145450.0604eb18@localhost>
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Hi Brett. --On July 20, 2004 3:54 PM -0600 Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> wrote: > > What do folks here know about the problems (which Dell didn't describe in > detail)? Is the new firmware compatible with FreeBSD's drivers? How can > one update the firmware from FreeBSD (run their Linux update under Linux > emulation, perhaps)? > I don't know if this will help or not, but we have two Dell PE 2450's with the PERC 3/Si controller (which I believe was manufactured by Adaptec). On both, we've had the controller lock up, hanging the machine. All drives and the RAID container itself were fine. Unfortunately, one of these times, the file system was corrupted beyond repair. It was somewhat frustrating that the RAID controller turned out to fail more frequently than a stand-alone hard drive. (Although, three of the eight 9GB Seagate SCSI drives that shipped with the systems have failed since we purchased them less than four years ago.) One other problem I experienced with the controller happened after one of the drives failed. The controller continued properly running on three drives of a four drive RAID 5 array, but when we hot-swapped the failed drive, the controller failed to automatically rebuild the array. It took a couple of hours of trial and error and a couple calls to Dell tech support to get the array to rebuild. I can't remember which version of FreeBSD the systems were running at the time the problems occurred. After having these problems, we decided a firmware upgrade for the controller couldn't hurt. We simply downloaded the update from Dell and applied it (it was a floppy-based upgrade). Since then, we have had no controller lock-ups, and when a drive failed, the controller automatically rebuilt the array when the failed drive was hot-swapped. However, we upgraded to a newer release of FreeBSD at the same time we upgraded the firmware, so I don't know if the OS played a role or not. Hope this is useful. Beric
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