Has anyone tested an ATA Raid 1 setup that utilizes the hptraid.o, pdcraid.o, or silraid.o modules? By testing I mean force a failure and see what happens. I spun up a copy of Fedora on a TYAN dual P3 mobo that has a Promise 20267 chip, applied all the recommended patches via up2date, and insmod'd ataraid and pdcraid, formatted and then mounted a partition for testing. I was surprised to find that the Promise controller allowed the O/S to find hde and hdf even though I used both identical drives to create a single RAID1 array via the Promise BIOS. My Google research suggests that all these mobo installed RAID controllers don't provide real hardware RAID, but offer a quasi (and I think unreliable) hardware/software solution. Is that true? I wrote all over the array and that went well. I even used up 100% of the array space and there was no unexpected behavior. However, when I forced a failure by removing power from one of the drives, the BASH script I was using to write files all over the array failed after a few seconds. I was expecting the remaining good drive to pick up the slack, but the partition turned into a read only partition. I unmounted and remounted and it was still read only. What good is that? I powered the machine down reattached the power cable to the one drive I had removed it from, and the PROMISE boot BIOS showed that the array was healthy. ????? After the O/S loaded I mounted the partition again, and it was read/write. However, the data was trashed. Has anyone performed similar testing successfully on any of the kernel supported raid modules I listed previously, or are folks just trusting these arrays to do the right thing when the time comes? Bill Gradwohl YCC (817) 224-9400 x211 www.ycc.com SPAMstomper Protected E-mail www.stomperware.com
