Areca ftl! :(

H

hokatichenci

Gawd
Joined
Oct 28, 2004
Messages
722
Well, I had so many great times with my Areca 1220 that I decided to spring on a 1110 at work when we lost a software raid array for the third time. The weird thing is that it only picks up the drives sometimes? And its degraded itself two times already. I'm hoping an actual install on it and booting off the array will sort out the problems, but anybody have ideas otherwise?
 
Set the controller to poll the SMART status every minute. That solved my problem(Dropped the same drive from the array twice in a 36hour period).
 
Booting off an array is Bad Policy. If you have a seperate boot disk and array, then you'll usually only lose one at a time. That makes restoring from backups a lot easier.

What's the model number of those drives? What power supply are you using?

 
unhappy_mage said:
Booting off an array is Bad Policy. If you have a seperate boot disk and array, then you'll usually only lose one at a time. That makes restoring from backups a lot easier.

What's the model number of those drives? What power supply are you using?
Click to expand...

The areca supports online drive replacement so my plan was to grab a hot swap cage and just do live swaps if a drive goes down. The drives are WD2500s, they're 250gb sata's from a while back, non-se or anything, just standard caviar iirc (3 yr warranty). One of the first things I'm doing is replacing the power supply, if that fails I'm gonna hopefully replace the rest of the system. The whole system is failing for some reason and locking up every once in a while... sort of weird all together.
 
hokatichenci said:
The areca supports online drive replacement so my plan was to grab a hot swap cage and just do live swaps if a drive goes down. The drives are WD2500s, they're 250gb sata's from a while back, non-se or anything, just standard caviar iirc (3 yr warranty). One of the first things I'm doing is replacing the power supply, if that fails I'm gonna hopefully replace the rest of the system. The whole system is failing for some reason and locking up every once in a while... sort of weird all together.
Click to expand...
You may encounter problems pretty fast with those drives, I'm sorry to say. Non-RE WDs have a bug where when they have to recover from an error they stop responding to commands from the controller. The controller sees this and drops the drive. When it starts responding again, the controller picks it back up and starts rebuilding the array. This puts a lot of wear and tear on the disks, and if a second disk should happen to have to do an error recovery, the whole array is toast.

 
unhappy_mage said:
You may encounter problems pretty fast with those drives, I'm sorry to say. Non-RE WDs have a bug where when they have to recover from an error they stop responding to commands from the controller. The controller sees this and drops the drive. When it starts responding again, the controller picks it back up and starts rebuilding the array. This puts a lot of wear and tear on the disks, and if a second disk should happen to have to do an error recovery, the whole array is toast.
Click to expand...

Well, at least I can put the blame on WD... kind of sad since I run 8x RE's on my home array and it works fantastic. I figured that the drives would work fine in just a light setup but the drives dropped out like every other reboot. I truly hope that I'm wrong and its a power supply issue :(
 
You're not. It's WDC's craptastic firmware at work. Again.
Color me unsurprised. Skip the PSU, and replace all the drives. Half the time even on a SMART poll every minute, the firmware just bombs itself out hard. I've seen it on them standalone when using smartd and similar.
Apparently my life stops to crash every few hours. :rolleyes:
 
I replaced the power supply and the card and everything has been chugging along nicely. Not sure why a power supply would cause drives to drop off the array, or for drives not to boot up all the time (well I guess that is a good reason). But either way it looks like Areca/WD arn't at blame here.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Booting off an array is Bad Policy. <snip>
Click to expand...

Seriously? I have never heard this before and apologize for the ancient bump. I see people booting from SAN and arrays a lot. Is this true? Or are there some guidelines around when this should be avoided?
 
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