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.