[CentOS] RAID-1 mdadm software raid and kernel crashing on hdd failure

Sat Mar 27 19:36:10 UTC 2010
Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik at iki.fi>

On Sat, Mar 27, 2010 at 11:01:08AM -0700, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 11:14:18AM -0700, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> >   
> >> Yup. 8 way RAID1 for the OS, 8 way RAID6 for the data. I was hoping when 
> >> I setup the 8-way RAID1 for the OS that I would get really good read 
> >> speeds since md is supposed to stripe reads from RAID1, but in practice 
> >> the RAID6 completely kills it for read performance (~61 MB/sec from the 
> >> RAID1 partition vs ~200 MB/sec from the RAID6 partition).
> >>
> >> In a deeply ironic turn of events, one of the hard drives in that 
> >> machine died in a way that freaked the hardware controller driver out 
> >> and caused a kernel panic last week.
> >>
> >>     
> >
> > I've also seen CentOS 5.3 (or 5.4, not sure) crash when a single sata hdd failed.
> > The system was running mdadm RAID-1 mirror, so it shouldn't have been fatal event..
> >
> > There was kernel oops on the console. too bad I didn't have time to capture it then.
> > System was running AHCI SATA on Intel ICH9 controller, with mdadm software raid.
> >
> > So there's still need for hardware RAID controllers..
> >   
> 
> I'm not sure that is a good conclusion. The controller *is* a (3ware) 
> hardware RAID controller - but the drive failure caused the 3ware driver 
> to crash. That I wasn't using the controller in HW RAID mode may not be 
> a good indicator that all would have been well if I had been.
> 

Heh.. well.. it seems we have many bugs.. :)

-- Pasi