spinrite6.0 - is it easy to break then remake RAID1 on SiI3112 controller(A7N8X mobo)?

[Alex Hunsley]

How easy is it to break a RAID1 set and then re-make it?
I ask because I'd like to run spinrite6.0 on my RAID1 disks, but it
won't operate on a raid set, you have to break the set and run spinrite
on each disk. This is fine, but how hard is it to then set the RAID1 up
again? Will I have to recopy all the data from one to the other again,
or can I tell the RAID1 setup to not copy any data?

thanks
alex

 

[Tim]

Just pull out one disc. IE SATA and Power.

I would recommend pulling out the disc on the second port.

If you are not going to do anything at all while running spinrite and don't
care which disc is used as the source for rebuilding later then it doesn't
matter.

Will you have to recopy?
Almost definitely. It depends on the controller. For example the Intel ICH5R
seems to keep a time or sequence stamp on the discs so seems to know which
has been used most recently. Each controller is different. This is why it is
important to do things such as you are to learn how the specific controller
behaves.

Please post back with your experience of both the rebuild process and what
spinrite results / benefits there are. Some people have had issues with
drives refusing to rebuild after 1 failing and the 1 remaining stopping the
sync process part way through.

- Tim

 

[Alex Hunsley]

Just pull out one disc. IE SATA and Power.

I would recommend pulling out the disc on the second port.

Ah, ok. Isn't the point to check both disks though? If I only ever use
spinrite on disk1, and disk2 is quitely failing and then dies without me
knowing, I will only then be trying to recover from disk2 when disk1
shows a problem, by which point disk 2 is dead! Don't I need to ensuer
the integrity of both disks?

Ah, just realised that you might mean "check both disks, but always plug
the one you're checking into the first SATA port, and unplug the other
completely"... is that what you mean?

If you are not going to do anything at all while running spinrite and don't
care which disc is used as the source for rebuilding later then it doesn't
matter.

What do you mean by "do anything at all"? You mean write data to the
disk, as in spinrites write-then-read sector testing?

Will you have to recopy?
Almost definitely. It depends on the controller. For example the Intel ICH5R
seems to keep a time or sequence stamp on the discs so seems to know which
has been used most recently. Each controller is different. This is why it is
important to do things such as you are to learn how the specific controller
behaves.

Righto, thanks for that..

Please post back with your experience of both the rebuild process and what
spinrite results / benefits there are. Some people have had issues with
drives refusing to rebuild after 1 failing and the 1 remaining stopping the
sync process part way through.

- Tim

What, so you mean they broke the RAID set deliberately, then during the
rebuilding the source disk failed, and the destination was unusable
because it was mid-way through being copyied to? Scary biscuits.

Aeeii, the issues of RAID1! I thought it was going to be a simple way to
protect my data...

I'll note useful info as I find it and come back to this ng with it.

Don't suppose anyone knows any good sites about SiI 3112 issues? I've
been googling already, of course, but not turned up much...

alex

 

[Alex Hunsley]

Please post back with your experience of both the rebuild process and what
spinrite results / benefits there are. Some people have had issues with
drives refusing to rebuild after 1 failing and the 1 remaining stopping the
sync process part way through.

- Tim

Btw Tim, what do you think of comments people have made about not
trusting on-board RAID controllers and instead going for a PCI card RAID
controller?
alex

 

[Alex Hunsley]

Btw Tim, what do you think of comments people have made about not
trusting on-board RAID controllers and instead going for a PCI card RAID
controller?
alex

followon...

argh! I keep finding out bad stories and opinions about the SiI 3112
controller!
e.g. http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic5460.html
- post at the bottom says SiI 3112 + via motherboard = doomed.
I may yet plump for a PCI card...

alex

 

[Tim]

The reason for recommending pulling out the second disc is that EG the
adaptec controller will know if it has marked a disc as failed but thats
about it. If you pull a working disc out of one system for a replacement in
RAID 1 in another where there is no failure, the adpatec controller plays
dumb. If the replacement drive goes into Port 0 (IE first boot) and is
otherwise healthy but not from this RAID then it will happily boot off it
and not complain loudly that its own configured raid configuration is
broken. You have to be observant and note that yourself. You also have to
know which disc is which and be sure to pull out duff discs only, make sure
the good disc is in Port 0, make sure the replacement has been zotted (IE
zeroed, not just fdisked) so it does not recognise it as a useable disc and
that it is eligible as a Hot Spare........

Thats the adaptec. The Intel ICH5R is a lot more sensible. The logic in the
adaptec is fine for controllers that have more than 2 ports - it is lousy
where there are only 2 ports and a broken raid 1 = 1 good disc and 1 bad -
it is not smart enough to realise it should a) SHOUT about broken RAID, b)
protect the 1 good disc (it does by making the whole job more picky and by
allowing the rebuild in windows only where it can see if a disc has
partitions, active partitions, windows partitions and so protect those by
refusing to mark a disc as a spare automatically - hence my words about
zeroing a disc)...

Add to this the fact that the adaptec controller interface is Web based with
a fat JAVA VM and no windows based alerting and frankly, compared to the
Intel, the Intel appears the better of the two.

With Spinrite (not too faimiliar with it). Its purpose is to detect and
repair sector level issues and may well be a good tool for RAID 1. I would
not be surprised if it did stuff up a RAID 1 disc though as there is no
knowing where the RAID 1 on disc config is stored. But then it is likely
only stuffing up a RAID 1 config by correcting a disc that is in itself
wrong already so otherwise stuffed.

A: What do I mean by Do Anything? Spinrite doesn't set out to alter data -
it corrects sectors or allocates alternate sectors if one is found to be
dying which is fine. You will likely have to rebuild if it detects errors
and corrects them as sector contents could change (I am not sure if it even
does this), but spinrite will not do anything unless it detects a media or
some other error.

WRT RAID 1 failures recently reported - Yes it is bad. A working RAID 1 was
not broken... (but this happens). In 1 case, the person had a system that
failed repeatedly. The system had a memory issue that was not resolved until
it was obvious that 1 disc was damaged. The person tried to rebuild (without
addressing the memory issue) and in doing so (with a new disc and using the
remaining supposedly good disc) they found that the good disc had issues
part way through. In another case, an IBM system with OEM Adaptec
controller, basically the same outcome - how it got there I know not, but
the advice from IBM was to file copy the data off, reformat and rebuild the
disc then rebuild the array. In this case the issues were perhaps due to
some hardware issue.

The advice in both situations above was to File Copy the contents off (IE
normal backups). So to reiterate what must be said repeatedly, RAID 1 is not
a substitute for backups, it is there to prevent system failure in the event
of drive failure. It is absolutely paramount to monitor RAID volume health.

A few rather obvious statements: SATA controllers do not like overclocking.
They often fail at the slightest overclock. So if you run RAID, *never*
overclock especially the PCI bus if the SATA controller hangs off it.

RAID is there for resilience: The basic systems must be reliable first and
foremost. A system that experiences repeated crashes due to memory issues is
inviting RAID corruption.

Have a good backup regime. If you using a caching RAID controller, you
really must have a UPS or battery backup in the controller, or disable write
caching, or have a controller that honours file flush requests* - many do
not and result in file corruption in the event of power failure. * Finding
out if a controller honours flush requests prior to purchase is near
impossible. Vendors do not answer questions like that, nor do they readily
reveal if write caching can be disabled. Thankfully the Adaptec SCSI
controllers used here do - the full fledged controllers are stunning - hot
plug and do raid builds, repairs, and conversions at run time without the OS
knowing.

- Tim

 

[Alex Hunsley]

The reason for recommending pulling out the second disc is that EG the
adaptec controller will know if it has marked a disc as failed but thats
about it.

[snip]

Tim, thanks for all that well considered info, a lot for me to have a
think about!
alex

 

[Tim]

Where to start? There are no doubt very many people using on board (and
onchip EG nVidia and Intel, Via and perhaps others) controllers for RAID -
it is a bit of a geek thing, but prior to on board raid controllers, any
RAID controller cost more than a good meal so were rarely used. The number
of RAID systems running now is bound to be many times that previously.

You only hear the bad news stories.

SIL makes chips for OEM. They make millions of chips. Most of the low cost
PCI controllers use SIL chips. The controllers are only as good as the
firmware and drivers, and then are only as good as the systems they go into
and the people that manage them.

No RAID controller is administration free. Take the best controllers on the
market - as an example the Adaptec I referred to in my previous waffle with
SCSI discs and so on. How would it get on if it was not configured
correctly, monitored and maintained? As soon as discs start failing it would
degrade. If - as we have - multiple RAID 10 configs (EG with in some cases 5
discs per mirror image) and you let drives fail or let PSU's clog up with
fluff and explode, or ran a system that would not run through 5 loops of
memtest86 then where would you be? Stuffed.

I have seen evidence of perhaps 2 situations where a RAID config has been
stuffed up by either Controller firmware or the device driver. This was a
while back...

In the case of Intel, it is backwards compatible - if the controller
firmware is out of date the driver does not offer the functionality and will
complain that the firmware is out of date. Others are not as good.

In the situations where people have been victims, it has been early on,
firmware updates have been available, and matching driver updates have been
available. This was quite some time ago.

I don't go out looking for these bad news stories, perhaps you have
references with more substance that are more recent. But I would discount
any story that implied the person had not had a firmware update in place
that should have been in place some time ago - ditto for driver updates or
flakey systems. Check also the motherboard vendor names. Some vendors do not
update their bios to include the up to date controller firmware. Often the
changes are minimal or cosmetic in class, but it may be possible to find
that a bios has been deprecated to the no-maintenance bin before the raid
controller firmware is bug free. This is why I buy Asus - they maintain
their bios well & promptly.

If you have any interesting references, hows about posting them.

- Tim

 

[Alex Hunsley]

Where to start? There are no doubt very many people using on board (and
onchip EG nVidia and Intel, Via and perhaps others) controllers for RAID -
it is a bit of a geek thing, but prior to on board raid controllers, any
RAID controller cost more than a good meal so were rarely used. The number
of RAID systems running now is bound to be many times that previously.

You only hear the bad news stories.

Yes, that is bound to be a factor!

SIL makes chips for OEM. They make millions of chips. Most of the low cost
PCI controllers use SIL chips. The controllers are only as good as the
firmware and drivers, and then are only as good as the systems they go into
and the people that manage them.

No RAID controller is administration free. Take the best controllers on the
market - as an example the Adaptec I referred to in my previous waffle with
SCSI discs and so on. How would it get on if it was not configured
correctly, monitored and maintained? As soon as discs start failing it would
degrade. If - as we have - multiple RAID 10 configs (EG with in some cases 5
discs per mirror image) and you let drives fail or let PSU's clog up with
fluff and explode, or ran a system that would not run through 5 loops of
memtest86 then where would you be? Stuffed.

I have seen evidence of perhaps 2 situations where a RAID config has been
stuffed up by either Controller firmware or the device driver. This was a
while back...

In the case of Intel, it is backwards compatible - if the controller
firmware is out of date the driver does not offer the functionality and will
complain that the firmware is out of date. Others are not as good.

Intel controllers sounds good, from what you're saying!

In the situations where people have been victims, it has been early on,
firmware updates have been available, and matching driver updates have been
available. This was quite some time ago.

Hopefully some problems have been ironed out, yes...

I don't go out looking for these bad news stories, perhaps you have
references with more substance that are more recent. But I would discount
any story that implied the person had not had a firmware update in place
that should have been in place some time ago - ditto for driver updates or
flakey systems. Check also the motherboard vendor names. Some vendors do not
update their bios to include the up to date controller firmware. Often the
changes are minimal or cosmetic in class, but it may be possible to find
that a bios has been deprecated to the no-maintenance bin before the raid
controller firmware is bug free. This is why I buy Asus - they maintain
their bios well & promptly.

Glad to hear you put some stock in asus, since my mobo is asus (A7N8X
deluxe), I do need to make sure everything is up to date though.

If you have any interesting references, hows about posting them.

Unfortunately I didn't keep any copies of the URLs! I found posts on
techspot.com regarding SiI 3112 problems, amongst places. Just found one
of them again: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic5460.html

You're probably right that I'm concentrating on the downsides and the
negative reports too much. Your points about the sytem adminstrator
being a very important link in the chain are very pertinent...

alex