NASLite Network Attached Storage

Has anyone tried the Adaptec 2610SA 6-port SATA RAID card? This is the 6-port version of the popular 4-port 2410SA and 8-port 2810SA cards. Apparently, Adaptec only made the 6-port as an OEM version for HP and Dell.

There are many of these for sale on eBay, but since the 6-port wasn't specifically listed in the manual (like the 4 and 8 port are) I was hoping someone had some experience with it (good or bad).

Thanks!

I have one of these DELL CERC 6 port RAID cards (Adaptec). I will try it out and let you know as soon as I get my download link from the admins for my NASLite 2 USB purchase.

Tim.

Great! Let me know what you find out. Thx!

It works just fine!

I installed NASLite2 this morning and it has been up and running. I have copied about 275Gb of data to the DELL/Adaptec RAID with no problems do far. Will keep you updated.

Good luck with your configuration,
Tim.

Great! I'll be breaking the seal on the 2610SA as soon as the drives arrive. I'm putting 4x400gb in a raid-5 configuration.

Thanks for the feedback!

Good luck with it!

My configuration is 4 x 250Gb Hitachi drives in RAID5.

Tim.

Tim (or Tony/Ralph):

Built the array with the Adaptec utility as RAID-5. It is still in the building/verifying stage (12 hours later at 75%). It said the array could still be used while building, just there would be a performance penalty. Everything seems OK during NASLite-2 installation until formatting. Attempting a format under NASLite gives a quick :

ERROR!

Formatting of Disk-0 failed.

Is the array supposed to be formatted under the Adaptec utility? Or did I miss something? (This is my first RAID-5 installation, so I'm a newbie in this area).

Thanks!

It has to be formatted under the Adaptec BIOS first before you can use it under OS control.

I'm at a loss. Maybe I should have been more specific. Here is what I've done:

- Install 2610SA Board
- Install (4) 400GB Seagate SATA drives
- With Adaptec BIOS:
- Initialize each drive
- Create Array as RAID 5

Array status was reported by the BIOS as Building/Verifying (xx%).
Eventually (long time) the array was reported as "Optimal".

The NASLite format gives a quick "failed" as described in previous post.

The only other option available in the Adaptec BIOS is a Low-Level format option that even the Adaptec manual says would not be necessary with most SATA drives (writes all zeros to the drive).

Did I miss something? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks...

Tim,

My problem appears to be a NASLite problem. If I create the array with three of the 400gb drives, I can get through the format. With four drives, I get the instant "format failure" message.

I'll re-post as new problem. Thanks!

Does anyone have any advice on this?..

I'm using the DEll CERC SATA RAid Card (dell branded Adaptec 2610SA with 6 ports).

And it works.. mostly.. but then it crashes after running for a while. all e2fsck checks drop the drive into a offline state.

Lots of IO errors, and Boom.. a offline drive.
Are there any bios settings one needs to adjust or change?

Running a Semperon +2200 with 768MB of Ram and the card above with 3 WD 320GB HDs.

Two are: SE16 WD3200KS 320GB's
One is: SE WD3200JD 320GB's
(might be a problem? didn't look very hard)


Thanks

My system has been powered down awaiting a fix for the >1 TB array formatting problem. I don't have any information on running the array very long. Sorry! I didn't want to start with a smaller array.

On the surface, however, it sounds like you have a drive or card problem.

Tony and Ralph know about the problem and have a work around untill they get a new version out. It involves booting from a Slackware 10.2 disk and using it to format the array EXT2. After it is done you then boot the box to NASLite2 and apply the EXT3 Journaling to it. Should work fine that way.

Mike

I don't think I was being very clear, and for that I do apoligize.

My question was less to do with the 1TB issue (though I need that fixed to, but, as everyone mentioned, use a distro cd, boot, format, apply journal, save, reboot) and the simple fact that reading/writing data to my array seems to be causing some serious corruption.

I had to kill all hardware cache on the array (read/write) and set my drives to throttle my drives to 150MB max to get it working in some stable fashion.

I was wondering if anyone else had to do this, or was this something wiggy with my rig.

Thanks

It's a adaptec raid controller, no seriously. Linux and adaptec raid controllers mix very badly.

IIRC it uses the aacraid driver under linux and I have seen quite a few issues over the years with that driver, stability, crashes, lockups and even dead motherboards.

I suggest not using the adaptec raid controller boards. And if you doubt my judgement I will refer you to the linux-poweredge@dell.com mailinglist and search for perc3/si and or aacraid.

Chances are that if you force a filesystem check on you multigb (~200) array it will probably choke and keel over. (with all your precious data on it ofcourse)

What you described in the previous post seems to be the fix for most people, killing the onboard cache disables the intelligent writing algorhitm.