To summarize previous posts: my Adaptec 2400A RAID card, with 2 Maxtor 160GB drives (model 6Y160P0) in a RAID-1, corrupts data and produces kernel panics under heavy activity. This is under 4.8 (plain vanilla install), ECS L7VTA motherboard (KT400), 512MB RAM, one vr NIC (on motherboard), 1 dc NIC (PCI), 1 Matrox Millennium II PCI video card. The 2400A is supported by the asr driver that is built into the GENERIC kernel.
After a lot of testing I have discovered some interesting things but I am not any closer to a solution.
- I put an old spare drive on the motherboard's IDE bus, did a basic install and thrashed the heck out of it to rule out problems with CPU, RAM, and other non-RAID components. This worked great. The system will be nice and fast when I get it stable! :)
- I then put the same spare on the RAID card -- not as part of any array, but as "just a disk." I reinstalled 4.8 and thrashed it good -- cvsupping new source, buildworld, etc. No problems. (The RAID array was not in the system at all.)
- Then I separately tested each of the Maxtor 160s as "just a disk" on the 2400A, first clobbering the RAID data. Each disk got a fresh 4.8 install and the same build/install world/kernel routine, plus some other big file operations that caused problems for the array -- like deleting /usr/obj/*. No problems!
- I have also done every imaginable type of cable swap and wiggle. I am as sure as I can be that there are no gross hardware faults in this system.
I am currently re-running Maxtor's utilities on the 160's but I don't expect to find any problems. Assuming the disks check out as good again I will have ruled out everything except some kind of bug or subtle hardware defect that ONLY effects RAID-1 -- and perhaps only with my hardware combination, as I know many others use this card with great success.
Oh, I haven't tested RAID-0. I don't intend to use it, but I will make a striped array and see how it goes just for fun. I will also try a Linux or Windows install too, to try and determine if this is a FreeBSD-specific problem.
Hmm, guess I don't have any questions for the list, but hopefully this post will show future Googlers with misbehaving 2400A's that they are not crazy.
Cheers, Matt
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