Friday, January 6, 2006, 11:16:31 AM, you wrote:
On Fri, 6 Jan 2006 at 9:39am, Bryan J. Smith wrote
Had you used the 3Ware's intelligent hardware RAID, it would have hidden the drive disconnect from the system. You'd see a log entry on the failure, and that the array was in a "downgraded" state.
Instead, you're using software RAID, and it's up to the kernel to not panic on itself because a disk is no longer available. The problem isn't the 3Ware controller, it's the software RAID logic in the kernel.
Yes, I'm aware of all that. I've been using 3wares for *years* (as giggle would easily have revealed). But, as the archives of this list will attest to, using these boards in hardware RAID mode in centos 4 is bad news. Performance sucks. There's some sort of nasty interaction between the 3wares and ext3 which makes the combo unusable, really. And we all know the upstream provider's stance on XFS.
I have a number of machines running 3ware cards on CentOS 3/4 and I haven't had any trouble with them in HW RAID.
Having the system hang every time a disk dies is, well, less than optimal.
No joke. It wasn't until even kernel 2.6 that hotplug support was offered, and it still does _not_ work as advertised.
Hotplug worked just fine on this system when I tested (multiple times) via 'mdadm -f -r' and 'mdadm -a'. It's the actual disk failure handling that's at fault here.