On Mon, May 28, 2007 at 04:50:03PM -0600, Greg Oster wrote:
> With the array in degraded mode, can you mount /dev/wd1a (or 
> equivalent) as a filesystem, and run a series of stress-tests on 
> that, at the same time that you stress the RAID set?  Something like:
> 
>   foreach i (`jot 1000`)
>   cp src.tar.gz src.tar.gz.$i && rm -f src.tar.gz.$i & 
>   sleep 10
>   dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.$i bs=10m count=100 && rm -f bigfile.$i &
>   sleep 10
>   dd if=src.tar.gz.$i of=/dev/null bs=10m &
>   end

I've modified the above like this:

#/bin/sh
for i in `jot 1000`
do
	cp src.tar.gz src.tar.gz.$i & 
	sleep 10
	(dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile.$i bs=10m count=100 && rm -f bigfile.$i) &
	sleep 10
	(dd if=src.tar.gz.$i of=/dev/null bs=10m && rm -f src.tar.gz.$i) &
	wait
done

I turned the unused RAID spare disk into a filesystem and ran the stress
test on the degrade RAID and the spare disk for over an hour. The machine
survived that stress test without any problems.

BTW: could this problem be related to the size of the disk? The RAID 1
     in question uses to 250GB IDE disks.

	Kind regards

-- 
Matthias Scheler                                  http://zhadum.org.uk/