I am looking at getting a motherboard based on nForce 3 or 4, and I am wondering if the RAID will be usable? I don't mind if I have to use the BIOS to setup/rebuild the array, but I don't want to buy a system I can't use the RIAD for at all. I note from ata-raid.c that there is a meta-data read routine, but no write one - I think this means I can use it after it's been defined, but not rebuilt or create an array in the first place. Any clarification welcome. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20060129/26d21775/attachment.bin
On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 04:46:52PM +1030, Daniel O'Connor wrote:> I am looking at getting a motherboard based on nForce 3 or 4, and I am > wondering if the RAID will be usable? > > I don't mind if I have to use the BIOS to setup/rebuild the array, but I don't > want to buy a system I can't use the RIAD for at all. > > I note from ata-raid.c that there is a meta-data read routine, but no write > one - I think this means I can use it after it's been defined, but not > rebuilt or create an array in the first place. >Correct. The implications of metadata read/write support and a list of supported metadata format can also be found in ataraid(4). Be aware though that there have been reports on the lists of data loss in connection with NVIDIA RAIDs. This seems to also happen on other operating systems. - Christian -- Christian Brueffer chris@unixpages.org brueffer@FreeBSD.org GPG Key: http://people.freebsd.org/~brueffer/brueffer.key.asc GPG Fingerprint: A5C8 2099 19FF AACA F41B B29B 6C76 178C A0ED 982D -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 187 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/attachments/20060129/6b014b3c/attachment.bin
On Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:46:52 +1030 "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> wrote:> I am looking at getting a motherboard based on nForce 3 or 4, and I > am wondering if the RAID will be usable? > > I don't mind if I have to use the BIOS to setup/rebuild the array, > but I don't want to buy a system I can't use the RIAD for at all. > > I note from ata-raid.c that there is a meta-data read routine, but > no write one - I think this means I can use it after it's been > defined, but not rebuilt or create an array in the first place.I would also check what the chipset used for it is. Some of the cheaper chipsets just have problems in general. I get ata command time outs with the onboard sata adapter on this board here. The built on one is a SiI 3112.
> Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2006 15:08:21 +0000 (GMT) > From: Gavin Atkinson <gavin.atkinson@ury.york.ac.uk> > Subject: Re: nVidia RAID + FreeBSD 6.0 > To: Christian Brueffer <chris@unixpages.org> > Cc: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, sos@freebsd.org > > On Sun, 29 Jan 2006, Christian Brueffer wrote: > > On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 04:46:52PM +1030, Daniel O'Connor wrote: > >> I am looking at getting a motherboard based on nForce 3 or 4, and I am > >> wondering if the RAID will be usable? > > > > Be aware though that there have been reports on the lists of data loss > > in connection with NVIDIA RAIDs. This seems to also happen on other > > operating systems. > > In my experience, they seem to be reliable while both disks work, but when > a disk needs to be rebuilt the RAID BIOS seem to pick the source disk at > random, as opposed to something radical like using the only valid disk as > the source.Gee, no RAID at all is reliable when both disks work! A RAID solution that has problems when one disk fails is pretty darn worthless as a RAID solution. ...> Indeed, on the hardware I was using (a Sun X2100 server), Solaris had the > same problem, and about 50% of the time you'd end up with corrupted or > blank disks after a rebuild. Sun have now stopped claiming in the > specifications that these machines support RAID... "Doctor Sun, it hurts when I do this." "Well, don't do that." Not the best response one might hope for. Regards, Jim