Moses Leslie wrote:
Hi,
I have a machine that currently has 4 drives in it (currently running
2.6.15.4). The first two drives are on the onboard SATA controller (VIA)
in a RAID-1. I haven't had any issues with these.
The other two drives were added recently, along with an SiL PCI SATA card
to put them on. lspci reports this card as:
0000:00:0a.0 Unknown mass storage controller: Silicon Image, Inc.
(formerly CMD Technology Inc) SiI 3112 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA
Controller (rev 02)
I initially used mdadm to create a new RAID1 of the two new drives, and
added them into the LVM group that the other ones were in to expand the
drive, but pretty quickly noticed (via rsync -c) that all new files were
corrupted.
I've since pulled the 2nd set of drives out of the LVM to test. It's only
when using a RAID-1 that I get occasionaly corruption. I split the drives
(each 300GB) into 4 75GB partitions each, and created 3 md devices. One
75GB raid1, one 150GB raid0, and 1 225GB raid5.
I used a script that newfs'd each one, dd'd multiple copies of files (one
run with a 1GB, one with 3GB, one with 6GB), md5'd those files, then
umounted.
At least once in each test run, there was a file with the wrong checksum
when on the RAID-1 part of the test.
After completing all the tests, I redid the md devices such that none
of them used any of the same partitions that they had used in the first
test (IE the RAID1 was sda1 and sdb1 in the first one, and was sda4 and
sdb4 in the second one).
I also did the same test using each of the regular partitions as well
(sda1-4 and sdb1-4).
I was never able to duplicate any corruption any other time than with the
RAID1.
There's never any error messages in dmesg or syslog.
Is there anything I can do to help track down where the problem is?
Based on my own experience, I would suspect hardware. I can't swear that
you don't have buggy software of some kind, but I've been running for
over a year on RAID-1 with critical data on the volume, and haven't seen
any indication of problems. Because of the data, the files get checked
against md5sums daily and sha1sums monthly. Some files are old, some are
added almost every day, files seldom are updated, but it does happen,
and they are moved to new directories on a fairly frequest (2-3
times/mo) basis. The checkfiles are run against an archival copy on
another system about once a month, so I'm pretty sure there is no
corruption happening.
Cables are my favorite source of intermittent evil, memory problems are
next, but that usually shows up everywhere if you look hard. Hope any of
this is useful.
--
bill davidsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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