More_work_on_the_promise_vtrak_15100

title: More work on the Promise Vtrak 15100 date: 2005-04-17 07:46:59

I don't know what I did right, but I've had a lot more luck with the Promise VTrak 15100 this time. I got a chance to work with it more on Monday, and this time it just worked.

For the record, what I'm using for testing is a P4 running FreeBSD 4.10, an Adaptec 39160 card, and the VTrak with 4 disks. I had set them up in one RAID 5 array on Saturday, and was unable to see the disks at all. This time, I deleted that array, created a new RAID 0 array of one disk, rebooted FreeBSD, and bam -- da0 was right there in dmesg.

I set up another RAID 5 array of three disks, ran camcontrol rescan all, and there was da1. Very strange.

Strangeness continued: the two disks were sloooooow when I first used them. The first array was about 250GB, and the second was 450GB; running newfs took 7 and 14 minutes__, respectively. To make sure it wasn't something specific to formatting, I ran dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/test bs=100m count=100, and the times were similarly ridiculous: between two and three minutes, compared to 2-3 seconds on a local, IDE-based drive. WTF?

I decided to reboot the VTrak, and the problem went away: the dd test took about 3-4 seconds...slower than a local IDE drive, but acceptable. Still no idea what might've been going on.