Re: Areca hardware RAID / first-ever SCSI bus reset: am I about tolose this disk controller?

From: Pierre Beck
Date: Mon Oct 01 2012 - 20:10:41 EST


Yes. When in degraded mode, timeout should be raised to five minutes or so. When in clean mode, timeout should be a tunable in milliseconds. Commercial RAIDs offer timeouts in ranges like 200ms - 2s. Plus a disk which was kicked that way should be scanned for and re-added if possible. With write-intent bitmaps, that would make RAIDs with aging disks or cables much more solid.

Also, non-degraded mode: Skip loop resets. Skip all resets actually, if possible. Just kick the disk. Degraded mode: Perform loop resets as it is now. A hung-up controller would then cause an array to degrade, but won't hang indefinitely. Granted, always doing loop resets keeps the array non-degraded, but a crashed controller is rare whilst failing disks are common.

linux-scsi and linux-raid should talk about this one day to make it happen. Requires a bit of interfacing between the layers.

On 02.10.2012 00:53, Chris Murphy wrote:
On Oct 1, 2012, at 3:33 PM, Pierre Beck wrote:
It's particularly annoying when in RAID and the disk could've simply been kicked within few seconds. Something that needs improvement IMHO.
Except that while this helps with faster recovery, you're now degraded. You wouldn't want this "fast recovery" behavior if you're at your critical number of disks remaining or you lose the array upon a few seconds worth of subsequent problems. So we kinda need context specific behavior.


Chris Murphy--
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