10.1's RAID = Crashes & Hangs

T

Toe

Registered
Hi. I'm trying to set up a mirroring RAID using 10.1, and am having serious problems. I am using an Adaptec 39160 Ultra 160 SCSI card (with firmware update and latest OS X driver) and two Seagate 15000 rpm Ultra 160 Cheetah drives (each with unique SCSI IDs). The computer is a dual G4/533, with only Apple-installed RAM.

If I format both drives as normal drives, they work perfectly all day. If I RAID them together (Stripe or Mirror) using OS X Disk Utility, I get hangs when I write to the RAID. By "hang" I mean that it stops copying and all applications stop responding (and I thought OS X was supposed to be crash-proof).

Since the drives work perfectly alone and crash the system when RAIDed, the problem seems to be with the RAID technology itself. I just tried a complete OS reinstall (starting with a clean software restore, then upgrading to the latest 10.1.3 and all other updates, then installing the Adaptec driver, then reinstalling the PCI card, then re-creating the RAID), and it made no difference.

I just now got it to work a few times, but the RAID was clearly running at significantly less than its top speed (more like original SCSI than Ultra-160). Then eventually, after some more tests, it hung anyway.

So the questions are: has anyone had success with the 10.1 RAID format? Has anyone encountered problems like mine? Any suggestions?

Thanks!

P.S. One other thing. I did manage to get FileMaker Server installed on the RAID one time, and when I run FMS and change the preferences, the changes do not stick (though they do stick if I run it off the internal IDE instead). I don't know if this is a related problem, or if it has to do with running FMP off other than the startup drive.
 
Sorry, haven't done RAID, but I recall Adaptec released new OS X SCSI drivers recently. I suppose you already got them though...

-Rob
 
Yep. I upgraded the firmware on the card (in OS 9), and installed the latest OS X driver. Adaptec claims "full support under Mac OS X 10.1."
:confused:
 
Apparently, the title of this post should have been "I'm a friggin' idiot, please help!"

So... when I first set up my two new hard drives, I only had one SCSI cable, so I had to change the SCSI ID on one drive. The Seagate web page showing the jumper positions was kinda confusing, and I ended up jumping both the front block and the back block. Duh.

When I got my second SCSI cable, I was still having troubles, but then I remembered the jumpers. I removed the jumpers from both blocks on the one hard drive (so they're both ID0, but on different busses) and now... ahem... it works perfectly. D'OH!

Sorry to bug y'all, but... lesson learned. But I also learned from the Mac managers list that SoftRAID is coming out with a OS X driver very soon (purportedly at MWSF, but apparently not for a bit longer) http://www.softraid.com/macosx.lasso . I like SoftRAID a LOT, and would much prefer to use it, so will probably switch when it comes out. Also, they claim they're working on additional RAID levels (other than 0 and 1), which could be awesome. Perhaps 5???

As for the problem with FileMaker not remembering it's preferences, one person on another list told me that it's a "known issue," but I'm still not clear on exactly what the issue is. I think FMPS/OSX doesn't remember it's preferences after a Quit.
 
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