On 3/10/11 9:25 PM, Chuck Munro wrote:
However, on close examination of dmesg, I found something very interesting. There were missing 'bind<sd??>' statements for one or the other hot spare drive (or sometimes both). These drives are connected to the last PHYs in each SATA controller ... in other words they are the last devices probed by the driver for a particular controller. It would appear that the drivers are bailing out before managing to enumerate all of the partitions on the last drive in a group, and missing partitions occur quite randomly.
So it may or may not be a timing issue between the WD Caviar Black drives and both the LSI and Marvell SAS/SATA controller chips.
I've seen some weirdness in powering up 6 or more SATA drives but never completely pinned down whether it was the controller, drive cage, or particular drives causing the problem. But I think my symptom was completely failing to detect some drives when certain combinations of disks were installed although each would work individually. Do you have any options about whether they power up immediately or wait until accessed?