[geeks] Poweredge 2400, SCSI details

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Fri, 16 Jun 2006 @ 22:57 -0500, Phil Brutsche said:

> When it's in *any* RAID mode (you can specify a single drive to be a
> stand-alone volume) it can happen - there are no problems if you pull
> the RAID key and use it as a plain-jane Adaptec SCSI controller.  

OK, that's good.  Software RAID is usually just fine anyway.

> The 2 biggest causes I've seen for a controller lockup are:
> 
> a) Flaky power to the drives
> b) Buggy drive firmware (BTDTGTTT)
> 
> The ultimate problem is that the Adaptec RAID firmware uses cooperative
> multitasking, and if a drive stops responding suddenly the thread that
> was talking to the drive gets stuck in an infinite loop, taking the
> controller with it.

That's a crappy way to write RAID firmware.  Ouch.

Interesting too, since there are so many good embedded OS out there
which wouldn't have this problem.

Evidently the same issue plagues some of the bad ATA/SATA RAID
controllers, and some SATA motherboard RAID.

> LSI Logic MegaRAID controllers can be had on the cheap and don't have
> that problem, and I prefer to use them if at all possible.

I'll keep that in mind.

> Oh, and Solaris 9 does *not* work with the PE2400 RAID controller.

OK.

Hopefully Solaris 10 going open will mean people will write drivers for
it.

Then again, I haven't really heard much about that happening yet.  It
might take awhile to get people interested, assuming they do.

The world is high on Linux, so it is hard to get anyone to see the other
UNIX systems out there.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["I wish life was not so short. Languages
take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about." - J.
R. R. Tolkien]