[OpenIndiana-discuss] Diagnosis help needed

[Sašo Kiselkov]

On 06/25/2012 09:31 PM, michelle wrote:
> I did a hard reset and moved the drive to another channel.
> 
> The fault followed the drive so I'm certain it is the drive, as people
> have said.

Then return it for warranty repairs or get a new one. SMART data should
help you get a clearer picture of exactly what's going on too.

> The thing that bugs me is that this ZFS fault locked up the OS - and
> that's a real concern.

You're obviously dealing with very bad hardware behaving in very
unpredictable ways. It is true that ZFS was built to run on inexpensive
hardware, however, the ways in which badly behaving controllers can
screw you over can far exceed ZFS' abilities to cope with that. Also,
"inexpensive" is a flexible term - SAS storage is inexpensive compared
to FC, but nowhere near "on-board SATA ports"-inexpensive.

It is likely that what you're seeing isn't so much the fault of ZFS
itself, but rather the SATA HBA not being able to cope with strange
device behavior (your logs actually tell that story) - don't make the
mistake of thinking all SATA chips can cope with hot-plug or weird bus
errors. Enterprise vendors, even with SATA hardware, test the various
failure modes and make sure things go down in at least a somewhat
predictable manner.

> I think I'm going to need to have a hard think about my options and
> possibly leave OI for FreeNAS, Nexenta or Schillix.

I can't speak for FreeNAS, but Nexenta and Schillix share practically
the same OS kernel underneath, so I don't think you'll get different
behavior from them. As I said, I think it was most probably caused your
on-board SATA HBA anyway, so no matter the OS, badly done hardware tends
to carry over into the software world.

--
Saso