Problems with IT8212

[colin_young]

I have a PCI IDE controller card based on the IT8212. It appears to be detected properly, I get messages at boot that it's running in 'smart' mode (not sure what that means, but I suspect it's in RAID mode although I'm really just trying to use it as a basic controller, but I thought I had disabled that in the BIOS) and the drives on it are visible. I can see them, partition then, create filesystems, etc.

What I can't do is run SMART commands against them. smartctl reports that the 2 drives on the IT8212 don't support SMART. I have a third identical drive on the onboard controller that does support SMART, so I'm pretty sure it's the 3rd and 4th channels that are the problem.

I'm also having problems with my system randomly freezing when the 3 drives are accessed (at least that seems to be what's causing the freezes) -- I'm in the process of isolating them by running them individually (I'm trying to run them as RAID5 currently) by drive and channel to see if it's a drive or controller problem, but does the lack of SMART capability indicate a problem with the controller? I did buy a dodgy no-name controller, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was the problem.

Thanks.

Colin

[colin_young]

Turns out that when I set the BIOS of the controller to run in IDE mode (instead of RAID) I kind of missed the bit where you have to save the settings. Now I've got it reporting as "100% native mode."

I've run bonnie++ several times since and I haven't had any trouble. We'll see what happens after the system has been running for a few days (I can't imagine it's a heat issue since after 12+ hours it should be about as hot as it's going to get).

[colin_young]

It seems there were some user screw-ups. I forgot that the raid was not auto-mounted, so I was actually running the tests against the main system drive. Good to know that works.

When I did run bonnie++ on the raid, I got performance about 1/1000 of the single system drive, which can't be anywhere near right, and the system has frozen several time since. I've even resorted to physically disconnecting the suspected drives and it still crashes. Next step is to pull the drives and controller.

[December]

I am having SERIOUS problems with my IT8212 since the kernel got past .2000 (Sorry, don't remember the exact version number).

I have not had it working right with kernel-smp-2.6.18-1.2200.fc5 or kernel-smp-2.6.18-1.2239.fc5, but the ones before 2000 seem to work fine.

I've no idea what the problem is now, except my file system seem to automatically un-mount it's self a lot, and has become totally corrupt a couple of times (although fsck seemed to recover everything and put it into the lost+found folder).

Try and earlier Kernel and see if that helps.