[OpenIndiana-discuss] BAD WD drives - defective by design?

Mon Aug 29 21:42:08 UTC 2011

Would tuning the kernel to deal with the super slow time-outs of consumer
grade drives help? It is not going to make your consumer drive an enterprise
product, or keep your performance high, but it might keep FMD from failing
out your entire pool and/or corrupting the pool.

These are guestimates. Your mileage may vary. 

First, let's give the piece-of-frugle SATA drive a 45 second time. If that
doesn’t work, double it until you find a time out that works and then start
lowering it. It really depends on how badly WD is trying to screw the pouch
on this. It would be helpful for everyone to report your results so others
know how to configure their systems for WD (if they are unable to avoid
buying WD in the first place).

In /etc/system:
set sd:sd_io_time=45

Now that we are hitting the timeout, let's give it three retries. Yes, that
is 135 seconds to time out -- outch -- buy hey, you saved a few bucks when
you bought sata right? And it works most of the time?

in /kernel/drv/sd.conf
sd-config-list "<MANUFACTURER> <PRODUCT ID>      ", retries-timeout:3

This string where you define the disk is a fixed length field and must be
padded by spaces. To properly format this, it appears that 8 characters are
for the manufacturer, 16 characters for the product id, separated by a
single space. I think iostat -En will reveal the proper strings to put in
sd.conf

Let me know if this helps... Or if you just dismiss it outright ;-)

j.

-----Original Message-----
From: Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk [mailto:roy at karlsbakk.net] 
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2011 2:24 PM
To: Discussion list for OpenIndiana
Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] BAD WD drives - defective by design?

file systems don't have sectors, they have blocks. and zfs normally uses
512b-128k blocks, which is fine. this issue won't be fixed by reducing the
recordsize in zfs, it's a hardware/driver thing

----- Original Message -----
> I think Rich was suggesting using 4k sectors on the file system, not
> asking
> what the drives sector size was.
> 
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 2:15 PM, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
> <roy at karlsbakk.net>wrote:
> 
> > All drives have 512b sector sizes, WD FASS (blacks) and WD EADS
> > (greens)
> > both use plain old 512 sectors.....
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > > The drives are attached to a backplane?
> > >
> > > Try using 4k sector sizes and see if that improves it - I've seen
> > > and
> > > been part of a number of discussions which involved this - and
> > > you, I
> > > think, actually.
> > >
> > > - Rich
> > >
> > > On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
> > > <roy at karlsbakk.net> wrote:
> > > > Hi all
> > > >
> > > > It seems recent WD drives that aren't "Raid edition" can cause
> > > > rather a lot of problems on RAID systems. We have a few machines
> > > > with LSI controllers (6801/6081/9201) and we're seeing massive
> > > > errors occuring. The usual pattern is a drive failing or even a
> > > > resilver/scrub starting and then, suddenly, most drives on the
> > > > whole
> > > > backplane report errors. These are usually No Device (as
> > > > reported by
> > > > iostat -En), but the result is that we may see data corruption
> > > > at
> > > > the end. We also have a system setup with Hitachi Deskstars,
> > > > which
> > > > has been running for almost a year without issues. One system
> > > > with a
> > > > mixture of WD Blacks and greens showed the same errors as
> > > > described,
> > > > but has been working well after the WD drives were replaced by
> > > > deskstars.
> > > >
> > > > Now, it seems WD has changed their firmware to inhibit people
> > > > from
> > > > using them for other things than toys (read: PCs etc). Since
> > > > we've
> > > > seen this issue on different controllers and different drives,
> > > > and
> > > > can't reproduce it with Hitachi Deskstars, I would guess the
> > > > firmware "upgrade" from WD is the issue.
> > > >
> > > > Would it be possible to fix this in ZFS somehow? The drives seem
> > > > to
> > > > work well except for those "No Device" errors....
> > > >
> > > > Vennlige hilsener / Best regards
> > > >
> > > > roy
> > > > --
> > > > Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
> > > > (+47) 97542685
> > > > roy at karlsbakk.net
> > > > http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
> > > > --
> > > > I all pedagogikk er det essensielt at pensum presenteres
> > > > intelligibelt. Det er et elementært imperativ for alle pedagoger
> > > > å
> > > > unngå eksessiv anvendelse av idiomer med fremmed opprinnelse. I
> > > > de
> > > > fleste tilfeller eksisterer adekvate og relevante synonymer på
> > > > norsk.
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> > > > OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> > > > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> > > >
> > >
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> > > OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> > > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> >
> > --
> > Vennlige hilsener / Best regards
> >
> > roy
> > --
> > Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
> > (+47) 97542685
> > roy at karlsbakk.net
> > http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
> > --
> > I all pedagogikk er det essensielt at pensum presenteres
> > intelligibelt. Det
> > er et elementært imperativ for alle pedagoger å unngå eksessiv
> > anvendelse av
> > idiomer med fremmed opprinnelse. I de fleste tilfeller eksisterer
> > adekvate
> > og relevante synonymer på norsk.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
> > OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
> > http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
> >
> 
> 
> 
> --
> "I hope some animal never bores a hole in my head and lays its eggs in
> my
> brain, because later you might think you're having a good idea but
> it's just
> eggs hatching" - Jack Handy
> _______________________________________________
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-- 
Vennlige hilsener / Best regards

roy
--
Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
(+47) 97542685
roy at karlsbakk.net
http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
--
I all pedagogikk er det essensielt at pensum presenteres intelligibelt. Det
er et elementært imperativ for alle pedagoger å unngå eksessiv anvendelse av
idiomer med fremmed opprinnelse. I de fleste tilfeller eksisterer adekvate
og relevante synonymer på norsk.

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