Re: sata_mv and Highpoint RocketRAID 230x, corruption?

[Mark Lord]

On 10-10-20 04:03 PM, Mathias BurÃn wrote:
..
> I'm currently not using the BIOS of the raid controller for anything
> else then staggered disk spinup. The HDD partitions start at sector
> 2048 (to get a 1MB alignment since they're 4k sector drives, WD20EARS)
> and end at the last sector.
> What I'm worried about is the corruption mentioned in dmesg, is this
> explained somewhere in more detail? Google didn't reveal much. Am I in
> danger?

Yes.  Just repartition the drives to avoid the final 2GB of each drive,
and then you'll be safe.

The RocketRaid BIOS that I examined here a couple of years ago,
liked to write "metadata" over top of whatever was in certain sectors
near the end of the drive.  EVEN FOR NON-RAID DRIVES.

I think it was the last even (power-of-two) multiple of 1GB or something,
so if you leave the final 2GB untouched, you're guaranteed to avoid it.

Thus the recommendation.

Cheers
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/