Hi Faris,
You write: > Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: mptbase: ioc0: Initiating recovery > Aug 1 16:12:19 vzbeta kernel: sd 0:1:0:0: mptscsih: ioc0: completing cmds: > fw_channel 0, fw_id 0, sc=ffff810234622500, mf = ffff81023e382b00, idx=6 > > I've just had a chat to a nice Dell support peep and he's asked me to > upgrade the firmware on the Perc (I'm one release behind -- not sure how > that happened), and upgrade the driver, before we do anything else (e.g. > replace the drive). > You may get a bunch of responses like this, but I'll just point out that you don't have a PERC RAID on this system (or if there is one, you aren't using it). The mptbase/mptscsih drivers are for the SAS 6i/R which you mention in you e-mail subject line and if anything is behind on firmware and/or drivers, it is that. You should probably clarify this with your Dell rep. > The key step that's worrying me is that before I can upgrade the firmware > and driver I apparently need to basically kill off the RAID-ness on the > mirrored pair, so I end up with two individual hard disks. > I can't speak to the SAS 6i/R RAID, but for the PERCs, I have been able to update the firmware while there were RAID-5 virtual drives configured (at least, I'm pretty sure this is the case). A mirrored configuration should in theory be usable as separate disks (and this is generally the case for Linux software RAID - /dev/md*). As long as the RAID metadata is being stored at the end of the physical devices rather than at the beginning (and this is usually the case) there should be no problem. However, you probably want to confirm this with someone who has actually used the SAS 6i/R RAID - on my systems with those drivers, I use software RAID-0 striping, and have never bothered with the hardware RAID support, as it would provide no performance improvement at all for that configuration. Even for RAID-1, where the hardware RAID in theory offloads some of the mirrored write overhead, I would suggest that you consider performance testing to confirm that the hardware RAID is actually faster - it may well not be. (The PERC RAID, on the other hand, with battery-backed write cache memory, offers significant performance improvement - especially for RAID-5 - and RAID configuration options that the software doesn't support). @alex -- mailto:[email protected] _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
